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Off-Topic • [Discussion] What do you do with 10+ years old laptops that still work fine?
news.woodpeckersnest.space / forums-debian-net:0 • 6 April • 3 minutes
I am working for a non profit and I am responsible for our computer hardware. We use almost exclusively free software. At least since Corona with the need to work from home offices we have had exclusively laptops. And nobody seems to want to return to desktop systems. I usually buy used high-end business laptops for about 300 to 500 Euros from Dell, Lenovo or sometimes HP.
We mostly have intel systems with 8th to 10th generation CPUs and only a few more modern and powerful systems for those of us who edit high-res videos.
Usually, I check devices I do get back from my colleagues and if they are still in working condition after I have cleaned them up I install a fresh system and prepare them as drop-in replacement devices colleagues can instantly use if they encounter issues that can't be fixed within a few minutes. Therefore, I have established that I try to get very similar devices for all colleagues so that it is easy to just swap out the M.2 SSD in order to allow them to carry on with their work while I try to find and solve the issue they had with their previous device. (It seems crazy to me that most of the business world uses Windows which doesn't allow the very handy practice of just putting the SSD into an other device.) Only rarely the hardware is broken and most of the time I can just prepare the old device for later use.
There are more and more older devices that never get used again, because my colleagues seem to work in a much different way than I am. I still use a device with a 2nd gen Intel CPU for arguably more demanding (graphic design) tasks than they need to do. They do have considerably more powerful hardware than me and still often complain that their devices are insufferably slow. I wonder if this is their experience because they surf on anti-social media platform pages the whole day which do senseless massive Javascript processing in the browser, have loads of tabs open and every installed application running at the same time.
I can't do everything at once and therefore, I don't need to have everything opened at once. Am I old school that I only open what I can work on at every given time and that I am not interested in those annoying platforms? (The other day we got such a huge Excel sheet that some people couldn't even open it. I don't see that as a limitation of our hardware but as a rather stupid way to share a too large amount of data.)
But I am digressing: I am troubled by the fact that we do have already about 20 laptops that are over 10 years old and which will probably never be used again despite me knowing that I could do every task I need to do on them perfectly fine without wasting my time by waiting for them to respond. I checked out local social projects that collect hardware to hand them out to poor people but they are only accepting hardware that isn't older than 10 years.
I get that older hardware is less efficient but the usual office tasks are not demanding enough to actually need such new hardware. The only Issue I encountered on 20+ years old laptops is that most "modern" web pages are to heavy to be displayed on those devices. This also confirms my annoyance with present day web developers and designers: Most content could easily be served much more efficiently. We don't need to limit ourselves to Gopher to only use technologies that make sense in any given context. Only very few people seem to care about efficiency (and about avoiding unwanted data collection in the background).
I am fine with using older hardware, but I can't use several computers at once. Are you happy with throwing away older still working hardware? Or do you have a better solution?
We mostly have intel systems with 8th to 10th generation CPUs and only a few more modern and powerful systems for those of us who edit high-res videos.
Usually, I check devices I do get back from my colleagues and if they are still in working condition after I have cleaned them up I install a fresh system and prepare them as drop-in replacement devices colleagues can instantly use if they encounter issues that can't be fixed within a few minutes. Therefore, I have established that I try to get very similar devices for all colleagues so that it is easy to just swap out the M.2 SSD in order to allow them to carry on with their work while I try to find and solve the issue they had with their previous device. (It seems crazy to me that most of the business world uses Windows which doesn't allow the very handy practice of just putting the SSD into an other device.) Only rarely the hardware is broken and most of the time I can just prepare the old device for later use.
There are more and more older devices that never get used again, because my colleagues seem to work in a much different way than I am. I still use a device with a 2nd gen Intel CPU for arguably more demanding (graphic design) tasks than they need to do. They do have considerably more powerful hardware than me and still often complain that their devices are insufferably slow. I wonder if this is their experience because they surf on anti-social media platform pages the whole day which do senseless massive Javascript processing in the browser, have loads of tabs open and every installed application running at the same time.
I can't do everything at once and therefore, I don't need to have everything opened at once. Am I old school that I only open what I can work on at every given time and that I am not interested in those annoying platforms? (The other day we got such a huge Excel sheet that some people couldn't even open it. I don't see that as a limitation of our hardware but as a rather stupid way to share a too large amount of data.)
But I am digressing: I am troubled by the fact that we do have already about 20 laptops that are over 10 years old and which will probably never be used again despite me knowing that I could do every task I need to do on them perfectly fine without wasting my time by waiting for them to respond. I checked out local social projects that collect hardware to hand them out to poor people but they are only accepting hardware that isn't older than 10 years.
I get that older hardware is less efficient but the usual office tasks are not demanding enough to actually need such new hardware. The only Issue I encountered on 20+ years old laptops is that most "modern" web pages are to heavy to be displayed on those devices. This also confirms my annoyance with present day web developers and designers: Most content could easily be served much more efficiently. We don't need to limit ourselves to Gopher to only use technologies that make sense in any given context. Only very few people seem to care about efficiency (and about avoiding unwanted data collection in the background).
I am fine with using older hardware, but I can't use several computers at once. Are you happy with throwing away older still working hardware? Or do you have a better solution?
Statistics: Posted by Onsemeliot — 2025-04-06 17:45
