While moving from one nest to another (we’re lemmings here; RP it a bit) I realized I still have all computers I ever bought or assembled, except for those that literally broke beyond any hope of repair.

Some are no longer used daily but all work and being on a point in life where everything and anything in the nest needs to have a purpose or a function, led me think what actually renders a computer useless or truly obsolete.

I was made even more aware of this, as I’m in the market to assemble a new machine and I’m seeing used ones - 3 or 4 years old - being sold at what can be considered store price, with specs capable of running newly released games.

Meanwhile, I’m looking at two LGA 775 motherboards I have and considering how hard can I push it before it spontaneously combusts to make any use of it, even if only a type writer.

So, per the title, what makes a computer obsolete or simply unusable to you?

Addition

So I felt necessary to update the post and list the main reasons surfacing for rendering a machine obsolete/unusable

  • energy consumption

overall and consumption vs computational power

  • no practical use

Linux rule!

  • space take up
  • @[email protected]
    5•1 year ago

    It can’t run Doom.

    But seriously, I question the “practical use” bit, not because it’s wrong but because it’s so completely situational. If you want it for a business you want to beat AWS prices probably, but if you are just goofing off a replica of the Zeus Z-1 is actually a substantial upgrade from an old XP desktop, just because of the huge cool factor. If you have some sort of basic but fairly practical personal need, the cutoff for usable will be in between.

    In your situation, I’d figure out how many you want, and then keep the n best ones by your reckoning.

    Shoutout to [email protected]

    • AggressivelyPassive
      4•1 year ago

      The weird thing is, that we’re currently at a point, where even very old machines are perfectly usable, if you’re not playing modern games.

      My main computer is an i5 4670 (or something like that), it’s almost 10 years old, but for my Firefox/vs code/docker workload, it’s pretty much about as good as my M1 MacBook. Sure, some tasks take a second longer, but not annoyingly long.