I have a similar attitude to the author. I bought one new laptop in my lifetime but realised that second-hand or refurbished offer better value for money. For the past eight years, I’ve been using a Core 2 Duo Dell Vostro from 2007. I’m conscious of the environmental cost to manufacturing brand new devices so I only ever buy second-hand mobile phones and I apply the same philosophy to other consumer goods – cars (20 years old), stereo equipment (25 years old), bicycle (15 years old), etc. I sometimes buy clothes from charity shops but the shops have so little range in male clothes that it takes too much time to find something I like in a size that fits.
My laptop is 13 years old and I’ve upgraded its RAM to the maximum (4GB) and replaced the hard drive with a SSD. It runs Ubuntu 18.04 with LXDE as a lightweight desktop environment. I could probably use a more minimal window manager but for my usage, it’s the web browser that tends to eat RAM – due to modern websites’ predilection for externalising a ridiculously huge amount of unnecessary computation on to the end user. I see the article writer mentions that they use Vivaldi and Midori. I tried Midori for a couple of months around 2015 but ended up coming back to Firefox.
What makes Firefox usable is that I disable a lot of (most) JavaScript with the uMatrix browser extension (I used to use NoScript before Quantum). Since I’m not very disciplined, I can have a couple of hundred tabs open at a time; what makes this feasible is the Auto Tab Discard extension which stops open (but unused) browser tabs from using RAM and CPU.
Having just inherited a Dell Studio 19" laptop from 2007 or 8, I find this very interesting- the browser part, that is. I see no reason not to run W10 on it- it'll run it fine. But modern websites- that's what sends most of my older computers to the bin.
My laptop is 13 years old and I’ve upgraded its RAM to the maximum (4GB) and replaced the hard drive with a SSD. It runs Ubuntu 18.04 with LXDE as a lightweight desktop environment. I could probably use a more minimal window manager but for my usage, it’s the web browser that tends to eat RAM – due to modern websites’ predilection for externalising a ridiculously huge amount of unnecessary computation on to the end user. I see the article writer mentions that they use Vivaldi and Midori. I tried Midori for a couple of months around 2015 but ended up coming back to Firefox.
What makes Firefox usable is that I disable a lot of (most) JavaScript with the uMatrix browser extension (I used to use NoScript before Quantum). Since I’m not very disciplined, I can have a couple of hundred tabs open at a time; what makes this feasible is the Auto Tab Discard extension which stops open (but unused) browser tabs from using RAM and CPU.