What to Expect from Old Windows PC's • Hacker News Board

Re: What to Expect from Old Windows PC's

#11

Post by valdiorn » Mon, Feb 01, 2021, 10:17 AM UTC

watersb wrote: post #7

The article discusses post end-of-support for Windows machines. > [Microsoft Surface devices get] firmware and driver updates for about four years after they are first released. This is a little better than Chromebooks and a little worse than Apple computers. My iPhone 5s received a system software update a few days ago. I was not expecting support for iOS 12. > Before Windows 10, Microsoft usually supported each ver…

3-5 years I guess is a reasonable expectation, but all of the windows devices I have, have lasted longer than that. And keep lasting.

My Surface Pro 3 is coming up on 6 years, and my XPS 13 is close to 7. And the thing is; I can see ZERO reasons to upgrade. Both devices still have good battery life, and are perfectly fast for any day-to-day jobs I do, including running Visual Studio. I even use my surface for music production and it packs plenty of oomph.

PC improvements have slowed down so much in the last decade, it used to be that every 2-3 years a new computer would run circles around your old hardware. not so anymore.

My main PC, a desktop tower I built in 2013, has received only a handful of upgrades since I built it. A new SSD in 2015, a 2060RTX last year, and just now I bought an NVMe PCIe adapter and a 1tb drive. This thing is basically "top of the line" despite sporting a an almost 8 years old i7 Extreme 4930k.

Re: What to Expect from Old Windows PC's

#12

Post by daveoc64 » Mon, Feb 01, 2021, 4:24 PM UTC

The article seems to think that the support period for Windows is "3 to 5 years". It's really 10.

Microsoft offers 5 years of "mainstream" support, where the OS can get feature enhancements and so on, plus an additional 5 years of security and critical bug fixes.

All versions of Windows since Windows XP have seen at least 10 years of support, which makes a lot of this article obsolete.

Someone could have got their PC with Windows 7 in 2009, had a free upgrade to Windows 10 and can get updates until at least 2025.

Re: What to Expect from Old Windows PC's

#13

Post by taffronaut » Mon, Feb 01, 2021, 11:39 PM UTC

Nextgrid wrote: post #10

taffronaut wrote: post #9

The focus here is on laptops. On mainstream commodity desktop hardware, Windows 10 long term support is a lot better than this article suggests. I just threw out a thirteen year old Xeon system (Dell Precision) that had been my daily (updated) Windows 10 machine including Zoom calls and playing NMS until mid Jan 2021. I think I paid about £200 for it 4-5 years ago.

How do you get the LSTB branch legally (or at least reliably)? Last time I checked, the license price would cost more than the price you paid for that PC. I'm running LSTB on my gaming machine and have to reinstall the evaluation version every 90 days to work around that.

I meant long term support in general but I was not specifically running LSTB. It ran vanilla W10 Pro installed by the reseller. I found much later it was not even an OEM license so not a bad deal - effectively the machine was free. The world must be awash with W10 licenses.

Re: What to Expect from Old Windows PC's

#14

Post by fukmbas » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 4:28 AM UTC

mjrpes wrote: post #6

"Computers that are Four to Seven Years Old - Although Windows 10 supposedly goes on forever, your computer may not have the necessary hardware to migrate to the current version of Windows 10 during this time period (or in some cases even earlier), and you will be forced to move to another operating system if you wish to continue to be "secure" on the Internet." This would be news to me. Windows 10 version 2004 requi…

x86 isn't going anywhere