What is the oldest computer you're currently using / what is the oldest you could use?

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Diesel

Diesel

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I got to thinking about this, How old of a computer could I use and still be happy.
I do have some older ones, My server is an FX-8350 (2012) that runs as a NAS with Jellyfin and Nextcloud and it does everything I need.
I have a 2012 Macbook Pro with Mint on it that I use from time to time for basic web surfing and it seems to handle that fine.
I think most of the games I would want to play can be run by a GTX 680 so 2012 feels like the sweet spot for me.

Thoughts comments musings?

EDIT: I'd like to interject for a moment, What I'm referring to as "use and be happy" is a computer that I could reasonably use as my main computer for the majority of my daily tasks such as playing games, watching videos and surfing the net. That was more of the question I was asking.
 
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I got an early 2010s laptop. Definitely over 10 years old. Nothing fancy or special. Used by a family member originally, got clogged with useless bloatware, got replaced by a newer laptop without a second thought in typical boomer fashion. I offered to take it off their hands, discovered that I actually like taking laptops apart to clean them, hunting for replacement parts and stuff like that.
It's useless for anything except maybe a couple older games I still play from time to time, and a bit too bulky to haul around, so it's more of an emergency spare machine/Frankensteinian guinea pig for me.
Needs a new HDD or two, a new battery, and a replacement WiFi module, though. I've read up on it, and supposedly the Wifi module breaking is a usual thing for that particular model, because of how it fits into the machine itself. Can't imagine myself using any of the truly ancient boomertech PCs, shit was before my time. Mid-to-late 90s is as far as I could comfortably go, probably, in terms of OS and personal usecases, at least.
Man, this thread's gonna be full of greybeards isn't it
 
If I'm an indie gamedev targeting for lowest common denominator I'm looking at a Haswell i3 with 8GB of RAM. This the oldest hardware new software should realistically target. Most likely unsupported on Windows 11, lacking TPM.

The TPM conspiracy is real, the amount of unnecessarily ewaste it will produce is a crime. Hopefully those Haswell i3's will have a life with Linux.
 
I have a chromebook from appx ten years ago in my bathroom as a wall clock/email/music player
my win7 machine died a few months ago after ten years
 
A 2014ish HP elitebook with Debian is my oldest beater that still sees active use (not even gypsies want to steal it). I can comfortably use DOS (and still have to) and make custom autoexecs and boot profiles.
 
I have an old Dell Inspiron that I used for Linux testing, although it isn't really my daily driver or anything
 
Jason_Cruiser dijo:
I couldn't use anything without a SSD. I could never go back to minute long boot-ups. A decent computer from the last 10-years is all I could handle. Maybe a higher-end 900 series card so at least I can run dark souls 3.
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I can't tell if this is bait or you are actually a NPC soytard. What's so important with booting up the PC and programs quickly? You only do that once or twice a day. Don't give me the "video editing" meme since you can use proxy files that are in the MB range and if you make music, you should have 16 GB (or more) of RAM to make up for the lack of SSD.

/HDD enjoyer
 
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ill tolerate up to 4 maybe 5 seconds of load time tho ive endured around 10 so it doesnt matter to me much so long as the things i want to run actually run, my beloved gt1030 has never failed me
 
I can exist just fine on a complete potato (~4Gb ram, any 64-bit processor) but that falls apart as soon as I want to play a game. The oldest GPU I own is a 770 and that'd probably still be fine for the majority of what I play anyway. On the server side I have one of those old HP Microservers, it works really well for just basic file serving and light duties (home assistant, pihole, even nextcloud at a push).
 
Right now? My current PC build, with one minor exception: I built this rig in 2017 with a Ryzen 3 1200 and a GTX 1050 Ti, it's now 2025, and the only upgrades I made were to the CPU (Ryzen 5 2600) and GPU (RX Vega 64). AM4's longevity to this point is an absolute godsend. If I went with an Intel budget rig, I'd have been pigeonholed with the same socket requiring a different goddamn motherboard. Before that, it was an old HP G7 laptop I got in 2012, lasted all the way through 2018, unfortunately it wouldn't boot after a certain point.
 
CrunkLord420 dijo:
Haswell i3
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This.

My daily driver is more modern, but I only ditched my old machine due to lack of support, and upgrading piecemeal wasn't really an option any more (eg. maxing out RAM). Likewise, I only gave up my 1060 because of VRAM limitations.

Were it not for bloat, I think it'd be perfectly fine for all the stuff I want to do.
 
The one and only W541 ThinkPad of Theseus, my daily driver since high school. I don't think anything is left of the original machine except the motherboard at this point. Swapped the stock i5 with a i7-4940MX, so with 32Gb ram and Linux it works like a charm. It can get a bit warm so it usually sits on a large external fan, but I've yet to have it fully overheat in ~10 years of use.

As for the oldest machine I could use, probably something from the Ivy Bridge era, an X220 comes to mind. I used an X230 as my travel & school laptop until a few months ago and could definitely stomach one gen's worth of weaker hardware.
 
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