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10 years old laptop - is it time to retire? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 1 month ago by someacnt@sh.itjust.works to c/hardware@lemmy.world

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My dad has a laptop I used to use, which has been working well so far. Recently, he got frequent out-of-memory (RAM) issues - the computer freezes, forcing to restart. It is hard to diagnose, but it might be that 8GB RAM might be too small even for light workload these days.

So, I just checked when it is produced - 2015-10. So it is now 10 years old. While I am wary of producing e-wastes, maybe that was long enough life we got out of it. Perhaps it costs more in electricity than buying a replacement laptop? So, I want to ask - is it time to retire this laptop?

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[–] finalarbiter@piefed.social 15 points 1 month ago

8gb of ram shouldn't necessarily be an issue in and of itself, although it's on the low end these days. The memory is also old enough that it may just be failing.

Some searching suggests you could use something like Memtest86 to run diagnostics on the memory.

If it isn't a hardware issue, you might have luck trying a Linux distro on it. Linux generally runs better on older machines than windows, and some distros are specifically designed to be lightweight and consume as few resources as possible.