I took out all her parts and determined that the fault was with the power supply and with a wonky pci shield on the wifi card. Replaced the psu and straighten the shield with pliers, reapply thermal compound for fun, and bam, shes back.
Its an i73770k lga1155 socket, with 16g DDR3 RAM. They dont make lga1155 sockets anymore, or DDR3 ram, so I would have been out $1600 to replace the CPU, motherboard, and RAM.
But now, she might have another 5 years in her yet. Im determined to keep her around until she's old enough to vote at least.
Probably, but I wouldn't settle for something that's just more powerful, Id want to spend the money to get higher-end current-gen hardware that will last me another 15 years, including upgrading to a good M.2 drive and better GPU. In AUD Id probably be spending at least $2k.
In fact I still have the birth certificate for my current PC, and I spent $1500 on it in 2012 dollars.
Ten year old laptop is 2013 (this post seems to be from 2023). That's really not old at all. I use a 17 year old machine and it works great for basic tasks.
17? As in 2007? What are the specs on that thing? You running a lightweight linux distro on it? Surely you have an SSD in there and have upgraded the ram.
It's interesting how light KDE has gotten. It used to be the big, bloated desktop environment that you wouldn't even try using on old hardware. It seems to have traded places with GNOME.
Resale value is great on them too. I sold my 10 year old MBP (after I paid for an Apple cert battery replacement) for close to 50% of what I paid when it was brand new.
Good for you but who pays that much for that old hardware? While many computers run well beyond 10 years, it's hardly surprising if components break down after that time.
My early 2015 MBP is still my daily driver for programming, I will never regret spending so much on an MBP when they last this long. I went through two windows laptops in four years before this one. It is starting to show its age with only 8 GB of RAM, but I’m going to use it until it melts haha
It was running Vista when I bought it, then upgraded to Win 7, and now runs whatever flavor of Linux I feel like installing.
Battery is shot. Screen connection is iffy, but works if you wiggle it. Several keys stopped working after I accidentally threw up on it, but I can use an onscreen keyboard for those.
I was pulling an all-nighter reading fan fiction serials while drinking Kraken mixed with Orange Juice and had also eaten a whole frozen pizza around midnight. I was not ok. The incident happened around 3am.
First time I'd ever vomited while drunk. I know my limits better now.
The only computer I have is a 12 year old laptop, it sounds like a jet engine if I try to play a 1080p youtube video, though local 1080p files mostly work fine. I use Shadow for gaming, creative work and anything else that just doesn't work locally and it's crazy how good it is, it never spins the fans much more than its idle speeds when streaming and the input delay is crazy low, unnoticeable 99.99% of the time. Even though I've used this for thousands of hours it still feels like some sci-fi fantasy.
I have a ThinkPad X220 that recently turned 13, with SSD and RAM upgrades, basic maintenance, and Linux it’s still running great for plenty of tasks.
Plus it’s so well built I could probably stick it in a plate carrier and use it as body armour. Doesn’t seem to matter how much it gets dropped or dropped onto, ol’ Thinky keeps on chugging.
I had an x201 that I sold on to pay for my now "current" (ha) OG Thinkpad Yoga. Sometimes I do miss that old brick.
Sure, it only had two point touch instead of 10... But it got 11 hours of battery life with the extended (swappable!) pack, a daylight readable display, built in GPS, a fingerprint reader that actually worked, and if anyone tried to steal your laptop you could just hit them with it.
I mean, I don't know if the 100Wh limitation is specifically reasonable, but I've seen lithium battery fires before, and they're pretty exciting. Fires on airplanes are pretty bad news. They probably had to have some kind of cap.
You can carry an additional 100Wh battery or power bank, which I do, so if laptop vendors would actually make laptops with 100Wh batteries, that's 200Wh that can be at least with you, albeit not all internal. And you can carry larger powerstations if you aren't actually flying.
In theory, laptop vendors could do that old Thinkpad route of having batteries that extended outside the case and make them as large as they wanted...you'd just have to fly with a smaller one.
i do live in brazil so its hard to get good hardware because os shipping and everythings supposed to be around 5x more expensive than stuff in the us (though in practice, its way worse than that)
my brother got lucky and got an rtx 2060 super at the end of the pandemic. the best gpu ive ever had was a gtx750 ti that simply stopped working, meaning im now stuck with no gpu, an i5 6500 and 16GB of ram (my brother got himself more ram and sold a 16GB stick to me that he was using)
So, a number of countries, including Brazil, have VAT, which is considerably higher than US sales tax. Looking online, it looks like Brazil has 17%-19% VAT, and sales tax in the US, aside from a few states that don't have it, is usually in the 6%-9% range.
And I can believe that for some products, maybe localization for Portuguese costs something, and economy of scale is less.
But how can it possibly be 5x? That seems far higher than anything that I could imagine producing. Some countries have protective tariffs to subsidize local industry, but I'm pretty sure that Brazil isn't big in the PC hardware business.
googles
Okay, this is a decade old. They cite other taxes as some of that:
Taxation is a recurring theme when you ask Brazilians about the cost of many imported goods. To take an example, the Brazilian website iG published an infographic on Apple products’ tax burden, and noted that the different taxes hitting the iPad add up to almost 55%.
So, that's pretty hefty. Still not 400%, though.
This is where ‘Lucro Brasil’ (“Profit Brazil”) comes into play. Coined in reference to ‘Custo Brasil,’ it denounces the fact that structural problems often hide abusive margins at all levels, which most Brazilian consumers aren’t aware of.
While it is always difficult to find out about distributors’ and manufacturers’ margins, several details seem to confirm this suspicion. For instance, 60% taxes don’t fully explain why items can be twice as expensive in Brazil, and why tax breaks take so long to be reflected, Gizmodo Brasil highlighted in a recent article.
Okay, but why higher margins?
According to many analysts, the Brazilian elite may have its share of responsibility here. In practical terms, a high price tag has become a selling point for some, the anthropologist Roberto da Matta explained in an interview:
“When I was living in the US, I was running once when I saw then president George W. Bush, running as well, with security guards. He was using the same Nike shoes as I was. Here in Brazil, it’s hard to picture such a scene. Because objects still very much reflect the social segment of their owners. The sneakers, the car, the restaurant aren’t valued only for what they are, but also as status symbols. This is why it is more expensive to have dinner in Rio or São Paulo than in New York.”
I could maybe buy that for luxury goods -- that's a thing, Veblen goods, but I don't think that most computer hardware probably qualifies.
Martin’s comment is a reference to reports that Foxconn is now manufacturing Apple products in its Brazilian plants – a piece of news that didn’t have any major impact on their price tags.
Hmm. That might be an argument that protectionist policy is involved.
Brazil is among the world's most expensive countries to buy Apple products, according to a new report looking at 20 countries worldwide, published by bank BTG Pactual.
The prices of imported electronics in Brazil are among the highest of the countries listed in the report and are justified the argument that the Latin country is a "tough environment for foreign players", who have to deal with "challenging and structural issues."
Such problems include high import taxes, complexities and bureaucracy for imports and bottlenecks around logistics. According to the report, that means players with local manufacturing operations will get the upper hand in the years to come.
At least for me, both my laptop (daily driver) and desktop would be considered old by this comic (2014 and 2017 respectively). Neither of them are struggling with the tasks I mostly use them for (writing notes, programming, light gaming on my desktop).
The only things they are struggling at, are modern video codecs and the ABSOLUTELY BLOATED shitshow that is today's Internet experience.
to be fair, everything struggles with software decoding on modern HEVC codecs (yes i realize HEVC is technically H265 but that's a stupid fucking name, and i refuse to use HEVC and AVC as anything other than generics for the class of codec they're in because that's the only thing that makes sense)
![Elders [Alex Krokus]](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/fc2ce290-f5ce-4973-8f43-65861afc1737.jpeg){kind=link}
