from Hacker News

What to Expect from Old Windows PC's

by TLM275 on 1/31/21, 4:13 PM with 12 comments

• by mjrpes on 2/1/21, 1:20 AM

  "Computers that are Four to Seven Years Old - Although Windows 10 supposedly goes on forever, your computer may not have the necessary hardware to migrate to the current version of Windows 10 during this time period (or in some cases even earlier), and you will be forced to move to another operating system if you wish to continue to be "secure" on the Internet."

  This would be news to me. Windows 10 version 2004 requires an x86/x64 CPU that is 1Ghz or higher. If you install the x86 version, you should be able to install on P4 systems that are closing in on 20 years old.

  The biggest upcoming change looks to be completely dropping support for x86 (Microsoft dropped support for x86 with OEM installs in 2020). That should still leave CPUs going back to the Core 2 Duo era (and some P4 processors) compatible. That's still 15 year old computers that can run Windows 10 in 2021 with the latest updates.

  I have core i5-2500 computers at work that have no problem running Windows. With the slowing of Moore's law these machines are maybe half the speed of the fastest you can get today, but not really noticeable for basic usage and web browsing. The best upgrade you can make is going to SSD, if you haven't done so already.

• by taffronaut on 2/1/21, 9:43 AM

  The focus here is on laptops. On mainstream commodity desktop hardware, Windows 10 long term support is a lot better than this article suggests. I just threw out a thirteen year old Xeon system (Dell Precision) that had been my daily (updated) Windows 10 machine including Zoom calls and playing NMS until mid Jan 2021. I think I paid about £200 for it 4-5 years ago.

• by rbanffy on 1/31/21, 9:58 PM

  It's interesting that, while a completely different world, Unix workstations are still somewhat useful. They'll happily run things like Emacs, let you ssh anywhere, and even run some apps over X (although modern Unix graphical apps can stress the network when running remotely). Last time I tried, Eclipse and NetBeans worked fine over a 10Mbps link.

• by watersb on 2/1/21, 1:25 AM

  The article discusses post end-of-support for Windows machines.

  > [Microsoft Surface devices get] firmware and driver updates for about four years after they are first released. This is a little better than Chromebooks and a little worse than Apple computers.

  My iPhone 5s received a system software update a few days ago. I was not expecting support for iOS 12.

  > Before Windows 10, Microsoft usually supported each version of Windows for about three to five years.

  Fact is that Windows lasts a really long time. While I realize that corporate support contracts are a different world, Windows XP lasted forever.

  Is 3 to 5 years of updates a reasonable expectation? What do people expect from (for example) Wal Mart laptops?

• by daveoc64 on 2/1/21, 4:24 PM

  The article seems to think that the support period for Windows is "3 to 5 years". It's really 10.

  Microsoft offers 5 years of "mainstream" support, where the OS can get feature enhancements and so on, plus an additional 5 years of security and critical bug fixes.

  All versions of Windows since Windows XP have seen at least 10 years of support, which makes a lot of this article obsolete.

  Someone could have got their PC with Windows 7 in 2009, had a free upgrade to Windows 10 and can get updates until at least 2025.

• by simonblack on 2/1/21, 1:20 AM

  You may also be told that your version of Windows was licensed for your hard drive, not for your computer;

  This may be what was intended, but I have often replaced hard drives and worked the 'Recovery Disk Magic' with them without any issues whatsoever. [apart from the glacial speed of the recovery software - but I assume that there is a sector-by-sector check of the hard drive in there as well]

• by pcdoodle on 1/31/21, 8:37 PM

  Was happy to find a Dell Latitude in there. The magnesium chassis plays a large roll in protecting those old motherboards from flex. Combined with a docking station, the latest model that would fit the bill for my use would be a m4800.

• by simonblack on 2/1/21, 1:12 AM

  Mary Jo Foley said recently ....

  Now there's a blast from the past. I haven't heard of her since around 2001, during Microsoft's heyday.