Why You (Probably) Don't Need to Get a New Computer

If you're reading this, it's possible that you think your computer is getting a little old and needs to be replaced soon. If you're like most of my audience you're just about to graduate college and might soon have the financial means to make an upgrade. But before you spend your hard-earned money and generate yet more toxic e-waste to go in our landfills, you should know a little more.

It is a common conception among less tech-literate people that computers "slow down" with age and therefore must be replaced every few years. It's understandable how people would think this, and I used to believe similarly. As I learned more about computer hardware in college however, it became apparent to me that this is simply not true. It's possible for hardware components to fail outright, but computers certainly do not degrade in performance over time. That said, many computer indeed seem to slow down over time. What could be the cause of this?

What people falsely attribute to the age of the hardware is actually due to constantly escalating resource usage from Windows and other pieces of software. In other words, it's a software problem, not a hardware problem. Whoever is developing your software simply assumes that everyone is constantly getting faster computers, and they make design decisions in light of that fact. This increases the amount of CPU, memory, etc that their programs need to run until your computer which once ran everything perfectly fine now feels totally outdated.

You may have noticed that these programs do not seem to be getting much "better" despite consuming more of your computer's resources. What is all the extra processing power going toward? It's a combination of things really, but none of them benefit you the consumer very much.

1. An expansion of features that you probably won't use. Commercial software has to constantly be expanding the scope of what it does so that the marketing department has new "wow" features to sell the product with. Some of these may wind up being useful, but the constant pressure to create new features generally leads to a lot of questionable additions. Eventually the program is trying to do so many things at once that it becomes slow and difficult to maintain. This is a known phenomenon in the software community called "bloat." A program that used to be nice and snappy now runs terribly, that is, until you upgrade your computer. Personally, I always find that the old version of the program was perfectly fine, the slowdown caused by these features amounts to actively making the program worse.
2. Collecting your data. Lots of software companies make money off of collecting your data and selling it to advertisers. It's profitable then to have the program run all sorts of unrelated tasks to acquire more of this data. You of course have no control over what kind of data they gather, which is a privacy concern in its own right. Even if this doesn't concern you though, this data collection still means more tasks running and therefore your computer running slower. Nowadays they also want your data so that they can train AIs with it, so expect this problem to only get worse.
3. Straight-up poor programming. The growth of the software industry means that there are many more programmers working in it. In the past, software development wasn't paid so ludicrously well and the only people who did it were actual computer geeks who were good at that stuff. Computers were also much less powerful, so you had to do a good job if you wanted your program to work well. Nowadays computers are much more powerful than is needed for most tasks, so it isn't as big of a deal if you do a terrible, inefficient job writing your program. We landed a man on the moon with computers hundreds of times slower than computers today, but my computer gets cranky when I have more than 10 tabs on my web browser. Why? Poor programming.

Luckily, there is a simple solution to make sure your old trusty computer can keep on kicking, at least until it actually breaks: install Linux!

I am typing this from a Lenovo Thinkpad T480, a laptop that came out in 2018. Everything is extremely fast and snappy and I feel like I'm using a brand-new laptop. When I bought this laptop it was running Windows 10, and I could barely even get past the lock screen, now its running better than any other laptop I've ever owned.

But aren't you a computer guy? What if I'm bad with computers?

Good news! My parents are also bad with computers and have been using Linux for about 6 months without complaint. Linux used to be pretty rough to use, but there's been a lot of work toward making it more accessible. If you want to dive under the hood and get really good at using it, you'll find it makes using computers a lot less painful, but if you want to keep using something similar to Windows there's something for you too: Linux Mint.

Linux Mint is a version of Linux that looks basically the same as Windows 10. The difference is it runs way faster, like way faster. It revived my parents old computer and they had no problem using it. Fact is, if you're like most people you just use an internet browser, and nothing about that's going to change with Linux. If you're a young person who's been raised on computers you can definitely figure out how to use Linux at least as well as my parents can.

The installation of Linux Mint requires a little bit of know-how, but there are numerous guides available online. Here is a good guide to install it. If you know me, I am also more than willing to assist in the installation process

Other benefits of Linux

• Respects your privacy: Linux is committed to not gathering your data. It currently does not collect anything and probably never will. The code for Linux is open-source, so if it ever does try to violate your privacy there would probably be a major uproar, and someone would just make a new privacy-respecting Linux. Not everyone cares about privacy, but you might consider how standing up for privacy helps those with genuine privacy needs, like journalists or those who live in authoritarian countries.
• Sticks it to big tech companies: If you are at all concerned about the influence of massive tech companies in the US, or if you dislike the recent behavior of some tech CEOs, Linux provides a way to stop supporting them. Linux is a community-supported piece of software, and it's pretty cool how superior it is to its major commercial alternative. It's an interesting example of an essentially non-capitalist, decentralized mode of production.
• Changes the way you think about technology: If you dig in to Linux it will begin to make you question the culture of "new stuff" when the old stuff works perfectly well. Bigger isn't always better, and often more complex technology just means more points of failure. Think about how modern appliances crap out after a few years and are unable to be repaired. This is both annoying and bad for the environment.

Cons of Linux

• Gaming: The main con I can think of with Linux is that it isn't very good for gaming. If you're a gamer you might have trouble running some games on Linux, though there has been a lot of improvement in recent years with this.
• Certain programs: It's possible that a program you want to use isn't supported on Linux. You can usually get this to work anyway with a program called Wine, but this requires some technical know-how. Most of the time this isn't a problem since a lot of companies have created a Linux version of their software. If not, there are usually alternatives that are probably better anyway.

Ok... but my laptop is actually broken

If your laptop has a hardware problem you can try and repair it, but unfortunately a lot of modern laptops are kind of terrible and difficult to repair. I recommend doing what I did and buying an old Thinkpad. These were made for businesses with reliability and repair in mind. They cost around $100 on eBay and you can then put Linux on them. Your alternative is spending many hundreds of dollars on a new laptop which will probably break soon. You really don't need very much processing power anyway unless you're playing modern video games or doing video rendering or something like that. Computers are a mature technology, so old devices work perfectly well for most tasks.

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