Hey, recently I’ve been browsing r/thinkpad alot and have been a part of the ThinkPad craze. I’ve noticed that lots of people, especially on that subreddit, still use Dual-Core CPUs, and deem them as more than capable, or enough.
I’ve been in the US for almost 5 years now, but I used to live in Brazil back in 2019. I’ve never owned a laptop with a quad-core CPU if I’m not mistaken, and I don’t think I’ve ever had more than 8GB of RAM (except on a Desktop) before moving here. I’ve grown accustomed to having a decent laptop, and desktop while living here, as well as a up-to-date phone, etc.
I’m curious to know what are people’s thought on older CPUs and usability of older hardware. I currently own a laptop with an i7 6th gen, which is Dual-Core and 8gbs and it really doesn’t get any attention, be it for watching youtube or doing online, browser-related study or just reddit browsing.
I couldn’t really picture myself using anything that doesn’t have 16GB Ram, and 4 cores, and preferably not freezing or having slowdowns, but after considering moving back to Brasil, and knowing the situation, especially for tech, since everything is harder to obtain and wayy more expensive, I’ve started question myself how many people are still using dual-core systems, that are happy with it and don’t see anything wrong with that.
I’d like to give the old X1 Carbon 4th gen another try and see how much my view could change. I know hardware has been getting a little cheaper in some ways and quad-core and higher CPUs have been popular for a few years, but I’m not sure that it’s still accessible to everyone as I’d like to think.
Thanks in advance!
Nothing more than basic office work, basic web browsing.
Even video playback is tough on old chips because they don’t support newer codecs like H265 and AV1, so by default anything over 720p on youtube will struggle and you ll need H264ify extension to enable the old h264 streaming codec that they support.
Personally, i’d rather buy a modern midrange/low end android tablet, +BT keyboard/mouse. People forget to mention that old laptops typically had garbage 720p screens and speakers and run with 4GB RAM and dead slow hard drive. You won’t be able to install modern windows anyway, and they run even worse after doing all the security updates on them.
You’d have to have a very specific usecase to use an old dual core x86 laptop running windows 7 or lower rather than pick a modern low end Android tablet. Windows 11 would run ok with just 2 cores of the newest Zen4 and Raptor Lake architectures that would be better than 6core laptops back in the day, but you don’t have modern cores in those dual core laptops. You have garbage in today’s standards.