If you take care to avoid the "modern" bloated crap, or notoriously intensive like new games, or now AI-related stuff, a decade-old computer is absolutely more than enough computing power for a lot of things.
There is absolutely a lot of bloat out there, including Office apps, but that’s just the landscape these days. People get used to running a lot of stuff when they have lots of resources, and will start closing apps once they start to see some performance issues, but there doesn’t seem to be many apps outside of the Linux ecosystem that promote a lightweight ethos, and even fewer sites are built like HN.
It runs Teams and Zoom just fine. I have thousands of browser tabs. I often use the common office apps; sometimes LibreOffice and Microsoft Office are open at the same time. It is always running Firefox, Telegram, Discord, Emacs and a Linux VM. YouTube often, no problems. And many sw dev tools.
When connected, it drives dual 27 inch monitors, but usually I take it out with me. The 10 year old battery still lasts a few hours and has never been replaced. It outlasted the brand new Dell I was given for a contract last year.
As well as MacOS it runs Linux in a VM, full screen so I can four-finger swipe between different OS desktops. I use the Linux desktop mainly for Inkscape in GNOME and other scripted image manipulations. In practice for most work I prefer to SSH from MacOS to Linux, to enjoy the benefits of the iTerm2 terminal, and use Emacs as a MacOS native GUI application, operating on my Linux files.
Currently using it for compiler and OpenGL development, zero-knowledge cryptography performance optimisation, database/storage engine development, and accounting software, in C, C++, Go, Rust, WebAssembly, TypeScript and Nim and a fledgling language I'm designing.
Credit to Apple, I think my 10 years old laptop is still serving me very well!
That said, I've just ordered Apple's latest M3 Max with 128GB RAM. I expect it to feel similar, though faster, not running low on RAM and storage any more, and Homebrew not warning of an unsupported OS and compiling everything from scratch. The M3 Max will be my first daily driver upgrade in 10 years, and is quite exciting.
There are a few things I'll be able to work on more easily with the new laptop and its larger RAM. LLM architecture exploration of course, but I have my eye on EDA and silicon and photonic simulations, large scale code analysis, new data storage and indexing architectures, current gen GPU APIs, and getting back into 3D graphics. I expect the 128GB will actually be useful for new types of activities for me. I use servers now but my internet connections are slow and high latency so local will be transformative.
But old-school things like Teams, Discord, Telegram, browsers with many tabs, office applications like spreadsheets, and various software dev tools, compilers, YouTube et al, even open at the same time, seem to work pretty well on my 10 year old laptop.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-2600+...
It will do all the things you mentioned (the CPU score is 33% that of an M2).
The entire machine cost about $1000 at the time (exclusive of case) if I remember right. It certainly wasn't $2000.
Since then I put a more modern video card in it for better compatibility (not performance).
I'd guess the original card it had (NVIDIA GTX 560) could run teams, a web browser, etc, fine, but NVIDIA's binary linux drivers don't really support that card any more (they claim to, but they don't support modern OpenGL APIs)
Some stuff sucks, YouTube is awfully resource intensive as are some other sites like Facebook, but since I mostly write it's acceptable for daily use. Thing sure does get hot though.
Maybe it needs more thermal paste, but honestly whenever I've tried that in the past on older laptops it made no difference.
Not sure what else it could be. Besides, it still works fine, just hear the fan whirring up pretty often.
My suggestions: Have you checked with Throttlestop if it's being throttled for any reason? Have you tried setting your power option to performance or checking the energy options for the cooling strategy and max clockspeed allowed?
Based on what you've written, I think it's very likely that the heat pipes (if any) need to be replaced since the coolant inside has probably evaporated and escaped. As it's a Dell, replacement parts should be easy to get.
I think I set some option in the bios to limit CPU usage/speed for battery life or something hoping it would run cooler, but whatever I changed never made a difference and it's been a long time since I've looked in the bios.
I hadn't heard of throttlestop, just grabbed it to run. So CPU is specifically a Core i5-2540m
The 4 cores are all between 66c and 68c alternating, and it says max is between 76c and 78c.
'Disable turbo' is shown as checked, so is 'BD PROCHOT', SpeedStep and 'C1E'. 'High Performance' is not checked.
When you say heat pipes, would that be referring to the copper colored metal over the CPU and GPU, what I had been calling the heatsink? I had not realized they had coolant in them at all. I've never replaced that, but I'm comfortable enough changing CPUs and such so I'm not worried about doing so.
If that's what I have to replace I may look on ebay and do so, would indeed be nice to have it running less hot, and also get rid of my probably irrational fear that the heat might make the battery explode.
If you're already comfortable with taking it apart, it's trivial to replace. I think it's your best bet. You might even be able to get it directly from Dell since they also sell replacement parts.
For such an old laptop I'm not sure if I want to keep spending money on it, $15 to upgrade the ram, $10 for a new keyboard after I broke keys from taking them off to clean them, $25 for a new battery etc.
Even though it runs very hot it does seem to work ok, and I'm hoping to just buy a brand new $100 or so machine hopefully in the first quarter of next year, but we will see. I still may end up doing so though.
I think I would have to try and buy from Dell directly, as on ebay all the heat sinks were preowned, and may be no better than the one I already have.
Was my initial guess as well, though it's hardly worth replacing unless wanting to keep it for sentimental reasons
Agree it's a pretty solid machine. Bought it for $10 secondhand in 2016 and it's still going strong.
But yeah I often just open a terminal and download the video.
I've installed the extension to redirect videos to a piped instance and that looks like it's going to work pretty well, so thanks!
Most likely your phone is more powerful than those old computers. Why not just hook it into an external monitor and use it?
You don't need USB monitors, there are plenty of cheap USB-C to DMI/DP dongles and adapters. If you already have a USB-C dock for your laptop, then the same one can be used for the DEX. The reason it's not more wildly used it's poor marketing and low consumer interest as the PC usage has been on the steady decline.
I think the general consumer just isn't aware that this is an option. Perhaps Samsung should offer free dongles with their flagship phones to build a market, because it's a real shame people don't know about DeX.
Most casual average people at home don't even have PCs with monitors anymore these days. Most people who aren't on their computer all day, just have a solo laptop with no other peripherals making DEX pretty useless to the average joe
Phones are content consumption devices. Maybe he wants to do something beyond watching tiktok.
It's unfortunate that Samsung abandoned its tests running a fully fledged Ubuntu when hooked upmto a monitor.
Yeah, sadly there are entry level laptops cheaper than a phone or said monitor plus a keyboard and mouse. I said "or" not "and".
Plus you know, people cursing Apple for making Mac OS look more like iOS. I don't think the great convergence will happen any time soon.
> browser based debugging only, but there are cloud based versions of VS Code you can use
So nothing works offline.
Many people already have a monitor, mouse, and keyboard lying around. They'll also have a phone already. Plus, there are very cheap docks where you can just slide your phone into a laptop shell, priced similarly to the worst and most awful Chromebooks imaginable.
> So nothing works offline.
You can run a vscode server on your phone (https://github.com/gitpod-io/openvscode-server/releases). What's lacking is the VSCode GUI, so pointing a browser at http://[::1]:8080/ will work just fine.
But, meanwhile, my Macbook Pro can drive two external displays, as well as having a good size internal display of its own that will still be useful. It's got 2 standard USB ports, for connecting keyboard and mouse. Add USB hub, and you have even more options. It has fans inside, so it can run at full tilt for quite a while before hitting any thermal throttling. 16 GB RAM means it's feasible to run a VM - and, since it's an x64 system, it can be persuaded to run many x64 OSs natively. One example would be Microsoft Windows, which you may have heard of, and which has been ported to x64.
The UX without any extra devices is fine as well. As well as the nice built-in display (which is a good size, and >200 dpi), it also has a solid inbuilt keyboard and a very useable trackpad. For all that I do much prefer a proper setup on a desk with a full-size keyboard and a mouse and a nice set of displays, the UX for general use without any peripherals is quite reasonable.
Also, it has a headphone jack.