Extreme ElectronicsApr 6, 2025

Re Microsoft win 10 machines.

Don't believe Microsoft

"because they can’t be upgraded to a supported OS there will not be the normal secondary market for those buying new hardware. This means there’s no boon for charities or other good causes, and instead this is a recycling or landfill choice.

This is criminal.

Recycle to Linux.

Show threadMartin Schlegel
@Extelec with all the speak about linux still running on old hardware: yeah but there comes a point where it gets really painfull.
Linux is better in this regard but not perfect. Let me sing you a song of how I struggled to browse the web on a 1999 IBM Thinkpad T23 with a Pentium III CPU.
No modern browser supports that CPU. You can modify firefox with enough technical knowledge to run on that thing but... apart from some very simple text based browsers, no support for that CPU.
Apr 6, 2025 at 12:27pmWeb
Show threadDec [{()}]Apr 6, 2025

@martinschlegel @Extelec
A 1999 ThinkPad. Is that the one with the butterfly keyboard?

Edit: the butterfly keyboard ThinkPad (701) is from 1993, and it has an i486 processor.

Show threadMartin SchlegelApr 6, 2025
@dec23k @Extelec nope, but you can literally dance on top of it without dmaging the machine xD
Show threadDec [{()}]Apr 6, 2025
@martinschlegel @Extelec
Just be sure to spin the HDD down and close the lid first, right? ;-)
Show threadDec [{()}]Apr 6, 2025

@martinschlegel @Extelec
Oh wow! Someone worked out how to fit a @frameworkcomputer mainboard into an otherwise dead IBM Butterfly Thinkpad.
https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/01/ibm_butterfly_repair_upgrade/

https://www.701c.org/

Bringing the IBM Thinkpad 'Butterfly' back to life

Framework offers refurb kit and parts – for instance, to upgrade a decades-old subnotebook

The Register
Show threadabs(in)theApr 6, 2025

@martinschlegel @Extelec Pretty much any version of #NetBSD should run on a #ThinkPad T23 out of the box, and #pkgsrc will include the ~latest #firefox. I tested it on a ThinkPad T41, which is only two years more recent than the T23 - https://youtu.be/jYS4TcgxMxU

Now, whether you can do anything *useful* in modern Firefox on a 1GB 32 bit machine... not so much

#PaleMoon or #ArcticFox are pretty capable browsers which run well on smaller machines - and #Dillo will *scream* on that spec hardware 😛

ThinkPad T41 from 2003, latest NetBSD & random web browsers (Firefox, Palemoon, Arcticfox, Netsurf)

YouTube
Show threadHellaApr 6, 2025

@martinschlegel @Extelec

Yeah, but hardware from that age was probably not supported by Windows 10 either?

Family members of mine use second hand business laptops with Linux (Thinkpad T460 and T470), which are now 8 or 9 years old. These you still can use, might upgrade them with more RAM and an SSD, and have a rather usable piece of hardware for normal use.

Show threadRaptor Apr 6, 2025
@martinschlegel @Extelec you'll have trouble with binary distros as most have dropped x86 but even firefox runs just fine on my thinkpad a22m (also 1999), other modern graphical browsers do as well. You HAVE to disable javascript though to have a good experience, modern websites can take over a gigabyte of memory just for simple text formatting with that crap, it's insane how bad web devs are, but obviously that won't work well on a machine with 512MB ram.
Show threadwoe2youApr 6, 2025
@martinschlegel @Extelec The hardware MS is trying to forcibly obsolete is nowhere near the point where it's actually obsolete. I doubt anyone is trying to use a Pentium 3 in 2025 to do anything other than run period appropriate software.
Show threadtrainguyromApr 6, 2025
@martinschlegel @Extelec in my experience basically anything new enough to have 4 cores is still quite usable in most Linux distros these days, which is a lot more than one can say of Windows