Have you tried swapping in a 21$ SSD?
I’ve on more than one occasion saved an old laptop from being replaced simply by slapping a cheap SATA SSD into them. The owners are almost always convinced that they needed a new PC, when all they do with it is browse Facebook and watch TikTok all day.
all they do with it is browse Facebook and watch TikTok all day.
World‘s most common PC use case
Tiktok on PC is god awful, so I doubt it. Facebook and porn maybe?
Kids these days will never know the frustration of booting a PC on an ancient HDD. I’d turn on my laptop, go do something else for 3 minutes, log in, go do something else for everything to wake up, then I can start using it.
My MILs computer literally takes about 10-20 minutes to boot up. When I told her I’d help her upgrade it, she said she’s fine with it. She turns it on and then does a load of laundry while she waits. It’s painful.
It’s a good motivator to do laundry I guess 👀.
Swap the drive and do a fresh install. It will run like new.
I still use HDD.
Get a SSD. It will run so much faster and everything will be instant.
I know, I used to use an SSD with a different laptop. But it doesn’t bother me enough, especially since I reboot it like once a month.
But why??
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I am a cheapskate
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I am too lazy to replace it (one of those modern hard to open laptops)
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I am too lazy to test and clone a 1TB (or more) drive
I actually used an SSD before with an old laptop, but that only required removing 2 screws. As for cleaning out dust, I don’t use it much anyway, mainly because I don’t want to deal with cracking this open.
I am just looking at getting some used ThinkPad.
But anyway, most stuff can be done on a smartphone. On the other hand, I already killed 1 motherboard likely due to overheating while re-encoding videos to AV1 in Termux. It was replaced under warranty both times though. The second time it was just some issue with communicating with cameras. Yeah, I am on this phone’s 3rd motherboard.But anyway, it’s a laptop. I reboot it like once a month when updating, so it’s not a big deal.
re-encoding videos to AV1 in Termux
Can you use hardware acceleration while encoding or did you cook the CPU?
No hardware acceleration. Anyway, AV1 hardware encoding is a new thing anyway.
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I’ve seen PCs that took something like 5 to 10 minutes to boot (xp era).
I remember my parents saying „hey don’t use it yet it has to warm up” and it really had to otherwise all sorts of unexplainable things would start to happen. Cold start of pc in the morning was really important ritual that no cc cleaners could shorten.
Also viruses that would modify browser to something funny. A president of my country with a serious stare appeared at one point in my browser stating that this pc is seized by the government.
It scared the shit out of young me with all the pirate CDs I had from street vendors. I don’t think even my windows was legit but a pirated one installed by PC parts business as an extra
To be honest I hate modern web and only Lemmy is feeling cool somewhat again. Everything else about digital landscape has become lame af. Without the struggle things lose any meaning
I’m using an old laptop as my Linux machine. I set up auto login and sway launch so that I can just power it on when I wake up so I can use it later
Just turn it off right after it shuts down before the OS starts booting again. (Or just turn it off whenever, it’s not like there’s much chance of filesystem corruption these days. Although there is a chance of registry corruption if you’re using windows and it’s updating, which is honestly worse to fix)
Modern Windows (and Linux) is very hard to kill. You can unplug it all day without issue. Registry corruption and similar issues have not been an issue in decades.
I had to recover a W10 box from a family members work after windows had slowly given itself cancer of file corruption. I’ve dealt with this shit before and it’s not a big deal… usually…
This fucker took 3 days of babysitting to bring back to life. In-place upgrades, it required multiple (why, no fucking idea), dism, sfc just chipping away bit by bit. And no, this is a work machine, so wipe and start fresh was reserved for actual “cannot be saved” situations. It has a backup plan, and I am the unofficial/unpaid IT guy for that location, but I don’t have license keys or installers for the software used (inherited situation), and it would add lots of friction to get running again. Absolutely not jumping on that grenade unless I must, it’s untested if a restore causes license validation errors (time checks and other bullshit).
After that fiasco I applied a universal scheded task of dism followed by sfc, on a monthly basis, and every six months a few automated checks but also I pop my head in for a minute (remotely) just to validate that those automated tasks are running successfully.
It’s been about… 4 years now? And it’s been working as-expected. But windows obliterating itself with no user input isn’t what I’d call ‘a thing of the past’.
(also it wasn’t a hardware fault)
I wouldn’t say decades.
Last time I used windows 10 on one of my computers an update somehow got stuck so I just turned off the computer and I was never able to get windows to boot again because of how broken the registry was. This was probably around 2019
A hard power off when the drives are mounted still isn’t a good idea. Just turn it off during post or when the grub menu is shown.
My 10 year old laptop (which has been running Linux for 9.5 years now) has an SSD, so it’ll restart in a normal amount of time. Even old laptops no longer have HDDs only
51 years8 seconds$ systemd-analyze Startup finished in 2.277s (firmware) + 1.145s (loader) + 1.644s (kernel) + 3.211s (userspace) = 8.279s graphical.target reached after 3.211s in userspace. $ lscpu | awk -F ' +' '/^ *M.* n/ {print $1, $2}' Model name: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3517U CPU @ 1.90GHz $ vmstat -s | awk -F '^ +' '/[0-9]* K t.* m/ {print $2}' 3901984 K total memory2s in firmware??? I’m used to at least 30s
What ram do you have?
32G DDR4-3200
I wonder if more memory still increases post time even on modern computers that don’t do a full test on every boot. I feel like I’ve noticed faster post on computers with less ram compared to ones with more but I haven’t gotten around to actually testing changing the amount on the same computer
I think my BIOS has a setting to skip that part
I’ve never experienced major slowdowns when running Linux on old laptops. It helps that OS fragmentation appears to be a problem exclusive to Windows
Fragmentation is only an issue if you run a HDD.
Whaaat my laptop is 13yo, It is faster than new, just because I added ram and ssd 4 years ago
It is actually amazing how much difference ssd made to my 6 year old laptop
Same, I have a 2012 laptop, just added RAM recently, with ssd replaced few years back. Boots in seconds.
So it’s 4yo.
Tfw some new laptops don’t even have a place to put more RAM.
Boggles the mind that laptop people just rolled over and accepted this bullshit.
SSD
HDD too, with Linux. IME it’s just Windows chugging storage devices for entire minutes after booting, for no reason.
(arch with gdm3 and gnome takes around 1:30-2 minutes to boot from an hdd on my old craptop)
Fr, modern DE just doesn’t work well with HDD, stutter everywhere and take ages to boot but most programs still lunch reasonably quick
Them running dual-boot with Windows as the default boot choice.
When running a somewhat descent Linux distro even on a potato rebooting usually takes like ~15s. With windows even on recent hardware probably 5+ min
Windows boot times aren’t nearly that bad actually.
I don’t understand why many desktop environments don’t have a confirmation when you click one of those. Only ones I know that do it are GNOME and KDE
The confirmation is annoying for many GNU+Linux users. It’s like asking are you sure you want to power off even though you had to use three or four keys or mouse clicks just to get to the poweroff menu.
It’s not the total number of clicks that matters. It’s the fact that several options (sleep, reboot, shut down) are the same final click and often a pixel or two away from each other.
That’s why I use the terminal. On KDE it’s even easier because I usually already have the terminal open in dolphin, so I just click into it and type “shut” and hit tab to complete
shutdown. No accidental reboots for me!omg shutdown user 💀 i thought everyone used poweroff
You thought wrong.
I think Cinnamon does that too.
On cinnamon: I click the power button in the menu, a pop up asks me what I want to do (suspend, restart, power off, cancel.)
I generally click suspend. There are no further pop ups.
Pls explain meme… 🥹 Am a Linux user, haven’t experienced that 🤔 I don’t see the fundamental difference between powering off Linux machine and restarting it. Presumably you’d have to power it on again at some point? Or is it that you’d have to wait for it to restart to power it off again? 🤔 Cause then it’s pretty safe to hold the power button for hardware power off. Once it’s restarted, all the user data is synced to disk. Hard power off before user login will not lose any important data 99.99% of the time.
You could also just press the power button at the GRUB screen, assuming you have one obviously.
not if Arch LInux is installed on it
Sometimes I wait to enter the bios so I can press the power off button while there.
Even worse if you clicked “Update and restart”
