While moving from one nest to another (we’re lemmings here; RP it a bit) I realized I still have all computers I ever bought or assembled, except for those that literally broke beyond any hope of repair.
Some are no longer used daily but all work and being on a point in life where everything and anything in the nest needs to have a purpose or a function, led me think what actually renders a computer useless or truly obsolete.
I was made even more aware of this, as I’m in the market to assemble a new machine and I’m seeing used ones - 3 or 4 years old - being sold at what can be considered store price, with specs capable of running newly released games.
Meanwhile, I’m looking at two LGA 775 motherboards I have and considering how hard can I push it before it spontaneously combusts to make any use of it, even if only a type writer.
So, per the title, what makes a computer obsolete or simply unusable to you?
Addition
So I felt necessary to update the post and list the main reasons surfacing for rendering a machine obsolete/unusable
- energy consumption
overall and consumption vs computational power
- no practical use
Linux rule!
- space take up
I tend to follow a ‘cascade’ type of upgrade pattern, one gets a new part and the replaced piece gets put into another where possible. At some point though it ends up as to upgrade this one part I need to also swap several others to support it. So it kind of becomes a ‘Ship of Theseus’ situation in many cases.
The real question of when is something useless though, it comes to a combination of a security thing (can I run a modern supported OS in a reasonably performant fashion) and if the function it served can be done on some other existing system (via virtual machines/containers usually) making it entirely redundant.