from Hacker News

The internet is killing old PC hardware [video]

by hexage1814 on 3/2/25, 2:27 AM with 147 comments

  • by sim7c00 on 3/5/25, 9:15 AM

    The system’s been hijacked. The craft of real engineering—building sharp, efficient, elegant systems—is buried under layers of corporate sludge. It’s not about progress anymore; it’s about control. Turning users into cattle, draining every last byte, every last cent. Yeah, it sounds dramatic, but look around—we’ve already lost so much.

    I’m running 24 threads at 5GHz, sipping data through a GB pipe, and somehow, sites still crawl. Apps hesitate like they need divine intervention just to start. Five billion instructions just to boot up? My 5GB/s NVMe too sluggish for a few megabytes of binary? What the hell happened?

    The internet isn’t just bloated—it’s an executioner. It’s strangling new hardware, and the old hardware? That’s been dead for years. Sure, you can run a current through a corpse and watch it twitch, but that doesn’t mean it’s alive.

  • by trinix912 on 3/5/25, 8:09 AM

    Well it wouldn't be that way if it were not for all the JavaScript. If we just kept on doing server-side scripting (PHP, CGI/Perl...) and used JS only where absolutely necessary (video players, games...) like in the early 2000s, it would all work fine on 15 year old hardware. But instead we use the browser as an OS and have tons of JS on simple news sites.

  • by mahrain on 3/5/25, 8:29 AM

    Even having a few 'retro' systems up and running, mostly Macs from the early 2000s, I find that what we used to do on them: chatting on Skype or MSN Messenger, listening to shoutcast streams or downloading on Napster, playing Unreal Tournament online etc. are mostly defunct now. What remains are local games, clunky word processors and MP3's on the local network. It turns out to be a largely empty experience unless you really get back into Command and Conquer or Metroid.

  • by dredmorbius on 3/5/25, 9:05 AM

    I've had very similar experiences myself.

    For most local applications, or simple over-the-Web fetches via curl, wget, etc., mid-aughts hardware or earlier often suffices.

    Amongst my hobbies are occasional large-scale scraping of websites. I'd done a significant amount of this circa 2018-19 on a mid-aughts iMac running Linux. One observation was that fetching content was considerably faster than processing it locally, not in a browser but using the html-xml-utils package on Debian. That is, DOM structures, even when simply parsed and extracted, provide a significant challenge to older hardware.

    I had the option of expanding RAM, and of swapping in a solid-state drive, both of which I suspect would have helped markedly (swapping was a major factor in slowness), though how much I'm not sure.

    I'll also note as I have for years that this behaviour serves advertisers and merchants as a market segmentation technique. That is, by making sites unusable on older kit, in a world where physical / real-estate based market segmentation isn't possible, is an effective way of selecting for those with discretionary income to buy modern devices. Whom we presume have greater discretionary income / higher conversion rates as well.

    (Multiple network round-trip requirements is also a way to penalise those making access from distant locations, as those 100--300 ms delays add up with time, particularly for non-parallelisable fetches.)

    I'm not arguing that all site devs have this in mind, but at the level which counts, specifically within major advertisers (Google, Facebook) and merchants (Amazon) this could well be an official policy which, by nature of their positions (ad brokers, browser developers, merchants, hardware suppliers) gets rippled throughout the industry. In the case of Apple, moving people to newer kit is their principle revenue model as well.

  • by axpvms on 3/5/25, 8:51 AM

    It seems to hold up pretty well for an 11 year old netbook which was quite underpowered even when it came out. The equivalent would be someone in 2014 making a video about how their Pentium IV setup from 2003 is killed by the modern internet. And actually that's a bit unfair, as Pentium IV was a premium product while this netbook was not.

  • by Rochus on 3/2/25, 5:27 PM

    > A solution is needed to help those old computers

    A solution could be to put another layer on top of the internet. This could be done by means of a "presentation proxy", similar to cloud gaming, e.g. based on VNC, where only a VNC client is run on the old computer, and the browser is running on the presentation proxy.

  • by zokier on 3/5/25, 9:43 AM

    I don't think the problem here is the age of the system, but that it was extremely crappy system even at it's time. It's 4 watt pre-Zen AMD CPU running at 1GHz. It's a CPU intended for tablets, and even for that it's bottom of the barrel. Something like i7-4770K from the same year (2013-2014), which I recall being very popular at the time, is over order of magnitude faster. The CPU here is more comparable to CPUs from almost decade prior, the venerable Thinkpad T61 would probably perform better.

  • by eqvinox on 3/5/25, 8:09 AM

    Indirect point: using an ad blocker protects the environment. Considering it also helps security (loading fewer things = fewer chances at exploits), it should really be the default.

  • by rahen on 3/5/25, 8:44 AM

    Not only the Internet, but also its technologies. Electron apps bring older computers to their knees, and those apps are becoming ubiquitous (MS Teams, MS VS Code, Whatsapp, Signal...). Sometimes they are even labeled as "lightweight".

  • by ironblood on 3/5/25, 8:53 AM

    Language severs as well. I had a desktop bought around 2015, with 16GB DDR3 RAM. That was quite a lot back to that time. For some reason, I used it for a while, and I needed an isolated develop environment, so I installed Debian server with Qemu/KVM, and assigned 4G RAM to it. It looked okay when starting neovim, taking about a few hundred MB, but when starting `tsc`, especially two or three seperate projects, the RAM was not enough any more. Lua language server also needs a lot of RAM.

  • by everdrive on 3/5/25, 3:11 PM

    My father in-law did web development for years, but has been retired for a while. I mentioned this to him briefly, and he said pretty nonchalantly “yeah, we were always pressured to push everything to the client to improve response times.” I’m sure there’s more to it than just that, but it was all very simple to him.

  • by xacky on 3/5/25, 9:10 AM

    Don't forget Cloudflare tagging old browsers as "bots".

  • by Sweepi on 3/5/25, 8:51 AM

      1. Using uBlock Origin and NoScript would help
  2. Sorry, but the AMD A4-1200 (2 Cores running at 1.0 (!) GHz, 4W TDP, Single Channel DDR3-1066[1]) was already slow when it was new back in 2013, it was introduced by AMD as a low budget *Tablet* option
  3. Regarding Video playback: As mention in the video, forcing Youtube to serve h264 should help, since the iGPU supports h264 decoding [2][3]
    This also makes me wonder: What does Youtube serve on this old machines? On my old Vega 56 (UVD 7.0 h264/h265/JPEG decoding support), yt runs without issues, but on the displayed HD 8180 (UVD 4.2, h264 decoding support) it doesn't? My current system has a Nvidia 1050 and gets served AV1, which the 1050 also does not support in hardware.

    My first instinct for yt's "auto" implementation would be to the serve a video in 480p and a codec the users hardware decoders supports, and if the user switches to a higher resolution, to serve it in av1 in order to preserve bandwidth. Maybe Youtube does not have access to the users hardware decoding capabilities, or they want to preserve bandwidth even at low resolutions.

      [1] https://www.techpowerup.com/cpu-specs/a4-1200.c1706
  [2] https://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature/#index8h2
  [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Video_Decoder#Format_support

  • by rembicilious on 3/5/25, 8:46 AM

    My favorite Firefox plugin is NoScript. There is often an incredible amount of third-party JavaScript running on commercial web sites. NoScript turns all the JavaScript off by default, and then you can whitelist it temporarily (or permanently, your choice) at the per domain level. (I will never whitelist google tag manager, how is it present on every freaking website?)

    So I visit thing-i-want.com and it doesn’t load because NoScript is currently disabling JS for that domain. No problem, I temporarily enable JS for thing-i-want.com

    The page refreshes and suddenly NoScript is disabling JS for 10 more domains!

    That seems excessive, maybe the page doesn’t need ALL of those scripts to function. I will enable that cloudfront domain and that one that has “static content” in the name.

    Page refreshes.

    Okay it mostly works now but also NoScript is showing disabled JavaScript from 5 more domains!

    ..Anyways Sometimes sites are running scripts from 15 or more domains and sometimes they are nested 4 domains deep. It’s absurd and OF COURSE it overwhelms older devices.

    If you want to use a modern browser on an older device, use a browser with a script blocking plugin

  • by zkmon on 3/5/25, 7:15 PM

    A new release of software or technology is not adapted for its new features. New technologies help to create new security vulnerabilities which in turn force new release of the tech. It's a vicious circle where tech and hacks play a catch-up game. Old PC hardware is like Mayans or uncontacted tribe from an island. They can't tolerate getting exposed to the new world of internet.

    Also, companies don't want to invest in supporting multiple versions at any point in time, and can't afford reputation risk by not forcing upgrades.

    My company let's the employees to request for and get a software installed, but can hardly allow them to use the features! The Risk & compliance department wouldn't like anyone to work or use any software properly. Any moving thing is a risk.

  • by bee_rider on 3/5/25, 4:27 PM

    > I mean it's not literally killing old PC hardware, but it is meaning old PCs are now becoming worthless e-waste (aka dead) because they can't browse websites like YouTube and playback videos... The internet is not designed for older hardware anymore, so it doesn't really matter what operating system you put on it, normal websites are now so multi-media rich and advert packed, that older hardware is going to struggle

    Hah, posted as a comment to a YouTube video.

    I know you have to go where your audience is. But like, block ads, block most JavaScript, don’t go on YouTube, and the internet is much better.

    This shoves you off into a smaller sub-sector of the internet. But if you are somebody who is nostalgic for the era when the internet didn’t suck so bad, it was quite a bit smaller back then too.

  • by psychoslave on 3/5/25, 10:09 AM

    So, not the internet, but some very popular websites.

  • by shortrounddev2 on 3/5/25, 3:16 PM

    I actually got an old iMac G3 connected to the internet and browsing the web. The previous owner had internet explorer on it, which seems to work better than netscape, though neither support HTTPS. I was able to download files to it using a locally hosted HTTP server on my PC, but browsing the internet with anything resembling javascript was out of the question

  • by ForOldHack on 3/5/25, 8:39 AM

    I actually disagree. It allows us to gather collections of retro software.

  • by agumonkey on 3/5/25, 1:16 PM

    we need a small web curated list, i often use indivious instances to avoid youtube cpu load, we can trim the fat

  • by everdrive on 3/5/25, 3:07 PM

    Block javascript, denounce javascript, avoid sites which make use of javascript.

  • by cowboylowrez on 3/5/25, 11:37 AM

    I have slow, limitted internet. I'm now blacklisting sites in my hosts file that suck up internet. Some I can't of course, I find it particularily funny that my bank has my browser ping spotify for instance. As others have said its just enshittification all around.

  • by barotalomey on 3/5/25, 8:56 AM

    We discussing random ragebait videos now? I swear, this site is nothing like it used to.