what irritates you most about using older pc's/laptops?

[Ashley MLP Fangirl]

as the title says, what irritates you most about using older pc's/laptops?

 

for me besides gpu's when i want ot game it's always ram. 

 

when i bought my MacBook Pro it came with 4GB of ram. the first thing i did about 10 minutes after i owned it was upgrade it to 16gb of ram... 

[spartaman64]

when they dont have ssds and i need to wait a few minutes after they boot up before using

[Ashley MLP Fangirl]

Just now, spartaman64 said:

when they dont have ssds and i need to wait a few minutes after they boot up before using

for me bootup time is irrelevant. i don't care about a boot time of 5 or even 10 minutes. as long as the system is snappy when it's booted up. 

[Sauron]

The inability to play 1080p videos and movies. If it's just a bit slow I can use it as a media center, but if it can't play my movies it's basically useless.

[Ashley MLP Fangirl]

1 minute ago, Sauron said:

The inability to play 1080p videos and movies. If it's just a bit slow I can use it as a media center, but if it can't play my movies it's basically useless.

then it's really old... and it depends what you want to play. youtube is very demanding these days. 

[EG!]

3 minutes ago, firelighter487 said:

as the title says, what irritates you most about using older pc's/laptops?

Not having an ssd or even a fast enough hdd.

It takes my old laptop 15 mins or more b4 i can use it.

And after not using it for a while those windows updates that take ages.

[Ashley MLP Fangirl]

Just now, EG! said:

Not having an ssd or even a fast enough hdd.

hdd is never fast enough for me  

 

Just now, EG! said:

It takes my old laptop 15 mins or more b4 i can use it.

damn

 

1 minute ago, EG! said:

And after not using it for a while those windows updates that take ages.

yeah. that's true. Windows updates on a hdd take forever. 

[Sauron]

4 minutes ago, firelighter487 said:

then it's really old... and it depends what you want to play. youtube is very demanding these days. 

Not that old to be honest, early atoms were terrible and part of what made them terrible was their lack of media playing capabilities.

 

As for youtube, in my experience the minimum performance required for 1080p video is a core 2 duo. 1080p 60 fps is barely beyond reach for those, but regular 1080p isn't an issue. High bitrate files are also not a problem for the most part. Much of it is down to the igpu and hardware acceleration support though, raspberry pis have slower cpus and yet are perfectly capable of playing high quality video thanks to gpu acceleration.

[Bananasplit_00]

the lack of being able to do stuff fast. so slow storage and very little RAM. sometimes CPU can hold you back if you get back to the P4s or early atoms. old laptops tend to have garbage battery life too as they have degraded from use. slow network speeds can also be a pain if you want to stream video, and the inability to even processs 720p can be a huge pain especialy on mobile devices

[19_blackie_73]

depends on how old you go
had a 10y+ old machine with xp still and wanted to make it ready for sale... Win7 / 10 is such an improvement in usability, i wasn't aware of that how much better it got
but on xp, you did not have to worry about people spying on you

 

[Ashley MLP Fangirl]

15 minutes ago, Sauron said:

Not that old to be honest, early atoms were terrible and part of what made them terrible was their lack of media playing capabilities.

 

As for youtube, in my experience the minimum performance required for 1080p video is a core 2 duo. 1080p 60 fps is barely beyond reach for those, but regular 1080p isn't an issue. High bitrate files are also not a problem for the most part. Much of it is down to the igpu and hardware acceleration support though, raspberry pis have slower cpus and yet are perfectly capable of playing high quality video thanks to gpu acceleration.

i had a Core 2 Duo E8400 machine and that was fine at playing 1080p 60fps youtube if i remember correctly. i paired that with a Radeon HD6670 and yea, 1080p 60fps was fine on that. it got loud when it played it but it could do it. 

 

although that was not that surprising since that cpu is a LOT faster than even kinda decent atom cpu's that you'd find in a lot of cheap devices.  

http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core2-Duo-E8400-vs-Intel-Atom-x5-Z8350/2720vsm143924

[Teddy07]

I upgraded my laptops CPU, Screen (from 720p to 1080p).

 

Downside:

The CPU hits 70-85°C when watching a 1080p video or stream. This means the fan gets very noisy. I already reduced the fan speed but that didn´t help enough.

 

 

 

[userzero]

Anything without an SSD or has anything pre core2.

[Sauron]

15 minutes ago, firelighter487 said:

i had a Core 2 Duo E8400 machine and that was fine at playing 1080p 60fps youtube if i remember correctly. i paired that with a Radeon HD6670 and yea, 1080p 60fps was fine on that. it got loud when it played it but it could do it. 

 

although that was not that surprising since that cpu is a LOT faster than even kinda decent atom cpu's that you'd find in a lot of cheap devices.  

http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core2-Duo-E8400-vs-Intel-Atom-x5-Z8350/2720vsm143924

The E6300 struggles with 60fps unfortunately, it depends on the specific model. Also I'm sure the dedicated graphics card helps.

[Ashley MLP Fangirl]

3 minutes ago, Sauron said:

The E6300 struggles with 60fps unfortunately, it depends on the specific model. Also I'm sure the dedicated graphics card helps.

i'd say it was the dedicated gpu then. i can't do tests with it unfortunately because that machine is gone. it was a fun system to mess around with but yeah it broke. 

 

but based on this:

http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Pentium-E6300-vs-Intel-Core2-Duo-E8400/m3310vs2720

i'd say it was the gpu. a 9% difference isn't much. 

[Guest]

Not having a decent XP machine that works..  

[Majinhoju]

I have an old Acer 6920g laptop that is really showing it's age.

Higher res youtube videos just stutter like crazy on it.  It's slow to open apps, slow to boot.  Just painful to use now.

I currently have Windows 10 on it (it was originally a Windows Vista laptop) but Windows 10 is not friendly running on mechanical drives.  For some reason disk usage spikes at 100% all the time.  I might pull windows off it and try Ubuntu.

 

[flibberdipper]

Trying to find drivers for actually old shit can be interesting sometimes.

[Blancaster]

Something specific to older laptops, is using the track pad. Older PC track pads are horrific pieces of garbage. I have been spoiled by my MacBook Pro's track pad and when I use my gf's old IBM Thinkpad I want to throw it out the window. 

[AngryBeaver]

The only machine I have that ever drove me nuts was an older I5 3rd gen laptop. I replaced the HDD with and SSD and even it flies now. The problem with older hardware is mostly the dumb older hard drives in them... so an SSD replacement gives them new life. My dad has an old Q6600 running in a machine i gave him years ago. I dropped and SSD in it recently on my last visit there and he thought I got him a new computer.

 

So... that would be my biggest complaint and fix for older machines. The good news is SSD's are much cheaper now so you can toss in a 250gb drive for less than 70 bucks in most cases.

[AngryBeaver]

11 minutes ago, Majinhoju said:

I have an old Acer 6920g laptop that is really showing it's age.

Higher res youtube videos just stutter like crazy on it.  It's slow to open apps, slow to boot.  Just painful to use now.

I currently have Windows 10 on it (it was originally a Windows Vista laptop) but Windows 10 is not friendly running on mechanical drives.  For some reason disk usage spikes at 100% all the time.  I might pull windows off it and try Ubuntu.

 

Just pull the HDD and toss in an SSD.

[Eduard the weeb]

getting only 5 fps in games.

 

but seriously probably just the limitation they have like especially compared to what I can get now for only like 200 dollars.

[Majinhoju]

5 minutes ago, AngryBeaver said:

Just pull the HDD and toss in an SSD.

I could..

Though I almost feel like a ssd drive would be a waste on this old laptop haha.

 

I did just toss a ssd on my old phenom 2 965 system and it made a huge difference, so i just might...

[Guest]

5 minutes ago, AngryBeaver said:

My dad has an old Q6600 running in a machine i gave him years ago. I dropped and SSD in it recently on my last visit there and he thought I got him a new computer.

It's amazing how much a bottleneck a worn out mechanical hard drive can be. This is also probably my only gripe with older systems.

 

Just now, Majinhoju said:

I did just toss a ssd on my old phenom 2 965 system and it made a huge difference, so i just might...

[Lathlaer]

6 hours ago, firelighter487 said:

for me bootup time is irrelevant. i don't care about a boot time of 5 or even 10 minutes. as long as the system is snappy when it's booted up. 

Yea until you have to restart your PC several times in a row because you are tweaking, installing some stuff and/or OC'ing ;-)