Tell HN: I used the same computer since 2007 (with minor upgrades)

I also find it strange - my Core 2 Duo[1] has 2GB RAM and spinning rust HDD (no SSD) and gmail loads in about 10s.

[1] I'm still using this laptop productively throughout our regular brownouts. It takes a bit of time to boot, but from login window to a completed WindowMaker startup (with a few xterms on startup + wicd app) it takes about a second.

Congrats on not contributing to making out planet a giant electronic dumpster!

My first laptop is from 2009 (ouch). It's a Samsung 17"3, with an Intel core duo, something like 4GB RAM and some ATI Radeon GPU. Though I'm not the primary user anymore, it still works well enough (main annoyance in that I broke the W key and never bothered fixing it). The only upgrade I have ever done is replacing the disk with a SSD after it broke (the computer felt from a table). The battery is completely dead now, so it mostly has become a desktop computer (which is fine, it's pretty big anyway, and an external keyboard/mouse are nice too, given the touchpad is shit and the keyboard is a bit broken).

It costed my parents 700€ (I'm in France), so even at the time it was not a very high end computer. It has served me well, and now my wife. I'm thinking of retiring it, maybe transform it into a server by removing the screen and the keyboard.

Not a computer per se, but I bought a good rice cooker in China in 2014. Not overly expensive (around 40 dollar) and much better than I could buy at home.

It stopped working in 2019 with some error code. Unable to go just go to china for a decent replacement (and the ridiculous shipping and china-local-product export tax, think 200 dollars) we thought let's give repairing it a go. After consulting friends and using online translation tools to dig through the manual, we found out that the temperature sensor was not giving a correct response.

Okay, so what is wrong. Using a screwdriver and the right amount of force, we managed to open up the plastic encasing of the rice cooker.

After going through the electronics, we noticed the wire from the board going to the lid of the cooker was, well, bent. Think like a thin speaker wire making a 90 degree turn. Well, that can't be right.

After cutting out the problem, soldering back the two wires and closing it off with some tape, it actually came back to life. It has since been working without other problems.

My desktop is a 2012 iMac that I got second hand in 2015. One RAM and spinny->SSD upgrade a few years after, and it's been going well since.

My personal laptop is a Dell XPS 13 that I think is now 10 years old and has never had an upgrade.

On both those, I don't keep any data for long before making sure it's backed up - I'm expecting a disk failure soon. Also the fan on the iMac makes audible spinny noises. But backups are good practice anyway, so that's a win.

I only just stopped using an external monitor that was so old it had a sticker on the front proudly boasting it had a HDMI port - fancy!

There are comments about investing in your tools here - and I think it's a balance. Yes, if you don't have the right tools your work will suffer. But the skills it takes to keep something running can themselves be valuable. And reducing e-waste is a good thing for many reasons, such as the climate crisis.

Away from computing, I just upgraded to a Canon mirrorless camera. A second hand shop had a body only model for way cheaper than it should be. I took a chance and got it, because I've seen their pricing go very weird on niche items before and I reckoned this was a similar case. (Most people looking for a camera from that shop would be after one with a lens - the seller should really have picked a different place to sell.) Turns out the sensor was filthy - but one cleaning kit later and it's doing fine.

For me, this is one of the main (subconscious) reasons why I stick with old tech for as long as I can. It is really frustrating to imagine a computer I would "throw away" to literally land on a landfill and rot there. In reality, this is not quite how it goes -- some parts get recycled; students in my country (Estonia) are currently refurbishing donated laptops for Ukrainian war refugees, etc.

But there still is a lot of electronic waste in junkyards. Thinking about this always makes me feel like a loser -- because I have neither the skills nor the time (nor even the need, considering that I already have all the necessary gear for daily life!) to repair as much of that stuff as I could. Junk is nasty and embarrassing. We have a lot of junk.