Lol Win11 on 8GB. My job got me that at first, i was at 95% usage on idle.
Saw this coming when Microsoft admitted to have bought up loads of hardware they couldn’t actually use yet. I’m convinced the data centre build out is to hoard all the computing capacity so we are forced to use their cloud services because our own hardware isn’t capable.
If this keeps up in a couple generations every personal computing device will essentially be a thin client with everything running remotely for a subscription.
That sounds disgusting. I’m willing to fall back to like DDR2 and my Core 2 Duo again, if it means maintaining my digital sovereignty.
Tbh, thanks to Wirth’s Law there’s a lot of unoptimized code out there. With the squeeze on hardware there’s incentive for developers to actually give a shit about making their software run well so they can maintain/build their userbase.
Don’t get me wrong, the current hardware situation is bullshit, but there’s ways to minimize its impact on consumers
With the squeeze on hardware there’s incentive for developers to actually give a shit about making their software run well so they can maintain/build their userbase.
That’s only if companies still allowed people to hand code. Everything is cuck coded slopware nowadays
Thanks. I didn’t know that had a name.
I hate wasting resources. The service i work on processes millions of transactions a month on a $14 AWS instance with spare capacity. Did I need to do that? No. But wherever we have performance issues I like to fix it before scaling the instance up. It was on the $7 instance for a while but 1GB memory wasn’t quite cutting it.
Unused RAM is RAM wasted /s
Except stuff do get more powerful over time, even a mobile phone is quite capable today, no need for a thin client there.
Fuck those hoarders though.
We allowed tech companies to have more money than entire countries by repealing the laws that forced them to reinvest their profits. They in turn bought out supplier’s entire stock of RAM to stifle their competition and eventually remove tech ownership from the lower classes. This has nothing to do with AI and everything to do with greed.
Sadly I fear worse, the bulk of people will adapt in the stupidest way…
What’s coming… is obvious. When the AI bubble bursts, there will be an absurd amount more data centers than use for them… and all the hardware is in forms that aren’t going to be convertable into consumer devices.
What’s going to happen is what microsoft, amazon, and google have been dreaming of for a decade… Remember google Stadia, Luna etc…
People won’t be buying PCs… they will be buying, thin clients. Your PC will just stream your hardware from a data center. The music and movie industries will be happy because the providers can scan for pirated content… governments may flat out ban individuals from owning personal computers, that’s a security risk they can’t control, they are already looking into bills to prevent personal AI systems. No worries of people bypassing age verification, or running custom OS’s or firmware that can’t be controlled.
Best of all it’s super profitable, instead of a few grand for a one time purchase, they can hit you up every month… and gradually raise the prices like cable, like movie streaming. Maybe even vendor lockouts… you gotta stream an MS computer to get access to office 365, but you’ll also need an amazon subscription to run some other applications, or games or whatever they locked in exclusivity for.
this is all based on the premise that an individual can afford the plethora of products and services on offer.
i think more or less that’s it’s difficult to foresee what will happen in the next 5 years.
what i believe people have a hard time understanding is that there is no such thing as “too large to fail”. it only takes a handful of poor decisions for a company to fail, and many more better decisions for it to succeed.
what i believe people have a hard time understanding is that there is no such thing as “too large to fail”.
Well, I don’t think people generally think that literally anymore. Nowadays what it ends up meaning is that if the company is such a monolith central to modern life, it can make the stupidest decisions imaginable and simply be “propped up” by sucking money out of our pockets.
Less “They’re too big to fail” and more “They won’t let it fail, even if it should.”
this is also very true.
i do believe that the pendulum swings back and forth but at the moment it’s swinging in the direction of people who are inherently selfish (amongst many other things)
I disagree. I think it’s been that way the past 10+ years, but now that we’re seeing the repercussions of that it might finally swing back the other way
this is all based on the premise that an individual can afford the plethora of products and services on offer.
That’s the neat part, your access can be dialed down. Oh you can’t afford the normal plan… what about buying in 5 minute increments, what about with ads? They will be able to match you for what you deserve with your current earnings.
When europe have succeeded to decouple from us tech, maybe they can fail all by themselves over there 😤
At that point you connect your phone to a screen and use that to handle what is needed for paying bills and schoolwork instead of yet another subscription. It’s after the AI bubble pops, so Greatest Depression time and nobody got spare cash for more services.
To be fair, the amount of RAM was stagnating for a decade already.
my main computer has 48GB of RAM.
And I don’t even game.
Damn, you could join two calls on MS Teams
You wish.
In 2015 it would’ve shipped with a functional operating system.
Windows 7 was discontinued by then.
yup. 8.1 first half the year… then it’s been all downhill since july 29, 2015.
Still better than 11, though it’s one of those “the bar is underground” situations
I bought a computer in 2007 that was 8GB of RAM and a TB Hard-drive, but a recent windows update bricked the machine because it didn’t have enough space. Is that what’s going to happen to these machines? Just, right off-the-line and into the garbage?
Not sure, on Linux I don’t really think about these things. Never had a computer become “bricked”.
Tbh it’s great for the Linux community because we can pick them up secondhand cheap and continue using them.
Brick more laptops Windows. 🐸
I doubt its fundamentally destroyed unless it did that during a bios update. You can probably install linux on it
Well what happened is it tried to update, got stuck, and now won’t start. tried starting it over and over and over again while hitting F1 and F2 and it just spins it’s fans. Though it randomly will start-up into a weird BIOS safe mode and give me a couple options, but I’ve yet to find the magic option that let’s me boot it up using the previous version of windows just so I can turn it into a Linux machine. It’s gotten to the point that I’m willing to pay someone to take it and convert it into Linux Fedora or Debian for me (and then pay for a quick tutorial in how tf Linux works 😭 )
EDIT is this actually a service? If this exists I’ll fucking do it, I swear
We can do some troubleshooting. Assuming its just software, you should be able to mash any of f11, f12, delete, or f2. Depending on the laptop, you may need to also press Fn. If that doesnt work, you get into the weeds of attempting to remove the bios coin battery or maybe (what worked for me one time) removing then reinserting the RAM sticks or shuffling them around.
From there, you should get a bios menu (UEFI most likely, but thats semantics). You should have a boot option, which you can use to follow any OS installation tutorial youd like.
The short version is find a working pc (library works) and an empty USB drive, download rufus, use Rufus to make a bootable usb, plug it into pc, do the thing that worked above, and bobs your uncle!
Id highly recommend CachyOs, choosing KDE Plasma and Limine, with BTRFS. None of those things have to make sense to you, but theyre probably the right choice for 9/10 laypeople.
Also you get “I use arch btw” bragging rights (I say so; some may disagree but theyll have to personally fight me irl)
Good luck!
Tip: you don’t need to boot in to windows to install Linux. If you can access the BIOS and/or a boot menu, you can boot off a USB stick and install from there.
Here’s one of many guides out there: https://linuxvox.com/blog/how-to-create-bootable-linux-usb-drive/
Is the BIOS battery just dead?
EDIT is this actually a service? If this exists I’ll fucking do it, I swear
It technically is for a lot of PC repair shops that don’t otherwise advertise it, but I remember some ye olde Craigslist posts offering such a service back in the day lol.
I’d honestly do it for free if I knew you in person lmao.
Same. I used to work in IT and this was my bread and butter for on-the-side money; “broken” laptops
Meanwhile at the Microsoft Store
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My Latitude from like 2019 with 32GB of DDR4 sure is feeling fancy these days.
Same. My 2019 thinkpad is holding up surprisingly well, especially since I’m not running the bloated vibe slop mess that is Win 11.
I have an absolute junk piece of shit hp laptop is had to buy in a hurry in uni because my desktop shat the bead. Did badly on w10 and worse on w11. Stuck linux on it and now it runs quietly and like a dream.
I am fucking 🤏 this close to starting a business where I just slam LMDE on poor people’s laptops and put on LXQT and call it a day.
The only problem is that if someone can’t afford a new laptop, they can hardly afford to pay me.
Also, I’m only good enough to just shove linux on a shitty computer, not be a 24/7 linux customiser. Also, getting paid to install linux on people’s computers seems like it violates… something.
Also, getting paid to install linux on people’s computers seems like it violates… something.
Nah, even the GNU people themselves explicitly encourage that.
awesome.
Do you also have a solution for the other problem?
The only problem is that if someone can’t afford a new laptop, they can hardly afford to pay me.
yea, lower your rates to something a bit less than the retail price of a new laptop.
Sure, but what’s the price? Too low and it’s not worth the bother, too high and the person that’s trying to get a little extra mileage can’t afford it. I don’t know when I can run classes since I’m taking care of my kid or looking for work and battling mental health stuff.
Also, I’m hardly Mr Torvalds, I can barely get my machine to work properly.
This is a calculation that anyone should do before starting a business: is it profitable?
If you’re genuinely serious about doing this, work out exactly what you’re offering and how long it will take you to do this for each system. Then work out what you need per hour to live, and work it through. You should now have a ballpark figure for a single customer/system. You might need to tweak it a bit to allow for bits and bobs. Practice it a couple of times on any different systems you can get your hands on. Be ready for hardware challenges like different GPUs or other hardware.
You may need to figure out ways of making things quicker/cheaper, by doing some jobs in parallel and automating some stuff with scripts. You may end up with, say, multiple flash drives with Ventoy containing a few images and some scripts.
Be absolutely clear about what you’re offering. It’s important for potential customers to know that Linux isn’t a Windows clone and it’s not trying to be, and it may take a little time to adjust, but also not too strong on that as to put them off.
Like you already identified, you don’t want to be a 24hr support line afterwards. You may need to invest in some reference material to get them started, in the form of a quick reference booklet or some Peertube videos, or even just a collection of links to a hand-selected group of videos or sites that others have done.
You may want to add extras, like data migration, but be careful not to have so many options as to confuse, and don’t offer it so cheap as to screw yourself. The data migration side is a minefield because of things like save games, settings and all sorts of obscure applications that can hide their stuff in nooks and crannies. Again, be clear that it’s only their docs and not all the other stuff. Also be clear that if they don’t opt for data migration their stuff will be gone: it seems obvious but not everyone understands that. Factor these things into your prices: when you’re advising people about the service you’re not getting systems done.
Support could be an extra, but again be careful of pricing: this is an area you could bankrupt yourself if you get your pricing wrong.
I don’t mean any of this to put you off at all. Running a business can be very rewarding and fulfilling, and could turn out to be the most awesome thing you’ve ever done. Depending on your commitments, you could try doing it as a side hustle to test out the market and refine your processes before diving in.
And, most of all, good luck!
Do it in batches. You are charging for your time basically. So don’t do them one at a time. Get a few USB installers, wait til you’ve got 5 or so ready to go, and then just do them all at once. Now you can charge less. I mean idk how much your thinking of charging but installing an OS isn’t exactly difficult. Takes maybe 15 minutes.
I’ve had the same thoughts as you a lot of the time! Very similar. I’ve been wanting to run install clinics at my local library but…I only work there part time sooo…they won’t let me since it’s far outside my job description.
But as an outsider, you could look into hitting up your local library to run the occasional event. :D
Also, I’m hardly Mr Torvalds, I can barely get my machine to work properly.
Don’t be too hard on yourself. Now that Torvalds has opened the gate to AI slop in Linux, he doesn’t know how to get it working properly either.
Charge less than the price of a new laptop? 🤷
Hey, you asked!
Depends on what you’d charge. $50-100 for your labor is way less than a brand new laptop.
I think you biggest problem is a lot of distros losing support for GTX1000 series Nvidia cards and older. Debian isn’t affected yet, but it’ll be a problem in a couple of years
lot of distros losing support for GTX1000 series Nvidia cards
that is a huge deal. there’s a hell of a lot of 10-series cards out there.
You’d be getting paid for the service, not for the software, so it’s fine
You perform work, and provide expertise. That is basically the description of a job.
Welcome to the Brazilian personal computer experience. Enjoy!
Just wait until AI sends most of us back to a time when we were unemployed.
I had 32 gigs of RAM in the PC I built in 2015.
I need to be honest here. I bought my current “gaming” laptop in 2020 because my PC got struck by lightning right at the height of the last GPU crisis and I needed something. It came with 8gb of RAM, upgradable to 32 gb. I have never needed more. That system runs Cyberpunk at 100 steady fps, and I have no desire to play anything more graphically intense than that.
That being said, I wanted to upgrade last year because it was possible. I looked up the price for SO-DIMM RAM right after it skyrocketed and said “nope, I’m good”.
