Should You Buy An Old Computer in 2024

unless you use win10 and Linux like i do....i love these older pc for some weird reason...am i that old to not see these computers as old lol

i have a core 2 duo cpu it's got to be at least 15 years old ,
Ive had windows 11 running on it, and it worked great,
but Microsoft , just got me so mad,
with all the changes their forcing down their customers neck,
that ive had enough off windows, and moved to Linux Mint,
and i love it,
everything works straight out of the box ,
and i have not had to go into the terminal once,
but if i do,
i no their are many teachers on you tube,
who are more than happy to show you the ropes, and if i was to build a new PC, I would put Linux on it.

The easiest way to "try before you buy" with Linux is to use a Live USB. There are lots of guides on how to use something like Rufus or Balena Etcher to make a bootable live USB of whatever Linux distro you want to check out. No harm will come to your installed system while you boot into and try out the live Linux system; just remember that it will be slower running from USB than from your main SSD.
When (if) you want to return to your installed Windows system, just shut down, remove the USB and boot back into Windows. It will be just as you left it.
You can then boot into Linux or Windows as you like just by inserting or removing the USB stick to try out and compare.
If you like Linux running from USB, you'll love it running at full speed from your main boot disk should you choose to install it.

As long as your cpu is second gen or later it will meet 24-2 requirements. As long as you have sse4.a or sse4.2 it will load and run 24-2 win11.

I started out with an Optiplex 990 and have had 4 Optiplex's all together, I still have an Optiplex 3070 and a Dell Presision in storeage, I found them to be a very reliable system and never let me down, I now have a brand new Ryzen-5 7500f with a Nvidia RTX 4060 Graphics card

To use Win 11 on Intel, you need at least an Intel 8th gen starting with a i3 8100 cpu and above. Intel 7700/7700K (Skylake) and below are not allowed to use Win 11😉

For AMD, you will need a R5 2600 and above. R5 3400g,R5 2500, R5 2400g and below are not allowed since these are Zen 1 gen cpu😉

Hi Brian Will you take a review on tiny11 is is it safe to use for quite some time.

I have a ThinkStation P510 that I have upgraded into a custom NAS with 50TB of storage(10TB x5) and I couldn't care less about Microsoft saying it don't supporting Windows 11 since I don't use it to go online(only connected to my network for file sharing) it's only used to backup my files and is only on here and there as needed.
My main desktop fully supports Windows 11 and also don't care because I'll stay on Windows 10 for as long as I can I don't like Windows 11 and the fact Microsoft is trying to force people to upgrade or buy a new computer this will only backfire on them when everyone that can't afford to buy a new computer jumps ship and leaves Windows for another OS to keep their older computers alive.

I run POP OS as a office pc no problems at all ,No more Windows updates.

Thinking is good. So is testing alternatives. Getting a cheap system for that testing makes sense.

Another alternative is to install Google Chrome OS Flex. It is basically installing a Chrome OS on old system, if your primary activities with your computer is for web browsing.

I suspect at 2026 there's going to be a lot of E-Waste around from then if M$ persists going down this planned obsolescence route. I'm surprized that the EU hasn't pushed back on this as they seem gung ho for new regulations against US companies operating there.

Good time to learn linux as it seems microsoft's current value proposition is "work for us for free and we'll let you use our operating system." "How?" "Don't worry about that, just click 'accept'"

Is a intel core i7-8700. 6 core. 3.20 ghz ok for win 11 pro? I have a lenovo i7-6700 and looks is not going to work for win 11.

I spend about 80-90% of my computer time on Linux Mint. Do I miss Windows 11? Only for the few things I can't run or do on Linux.

My wife and I are each running off lease desktops as our daily drivers and Thinkpad T520 laptops. I'm also using a T420 as a poor mans server on our LAN. They are all running Win 10. We have no interest in Win 11. If we had our druthers we would still be on Win 7.

I am using an old pc dell optiplex 9020 from 4 years and i am using linux mint on it from 3 months it is running fine

So in a Nut shell Brian, are you saying that my unsurported old hp 8770W will take an update and then Stop booting. or Will we get a Warning (this update will stop you from Booting) Install Y/N

Yes, ofc yes, if it suit your need

I'm running Win 11 on systems all the way down to a 3770K and 2600 CPU. Runs great and they also have the SSE4 support needed for 24H2. Actually, it sounds like Ubuntu users are going to have more trouble with old systems than Win11 users.

The price of the older computer will come down.
Good for me.

It's interesting that My EVGA 299 Dark motherboard with 32 GB ram and I9 chip and a EVGA 2080 KINGPIN video card is not good enough for Win 11!
I'm not throwing away a $3000 computer because of Microsoft.

will a modern day linux install have any trouble running a windows 11 virtual machine? Is there a way to run a virtual win11 on old machines through emulation?

Total control take over

Getting sickening folks

i tried linux mint yesterday and i was having problems like lagging and asking me for a password every time to install apps and it was taking awhile to install the app i wanted

Hi, can you tell me if the 4080 super inno3d ichill x3 is good? Thank you for your reply

This is your second video on this subject and you show sellers names on ebay..Looks like you have a problem with refurbished IT retailers. Win 10 iot enterprise is getting extended updates to 2037 and can be purchased online ..Also 6th gen machines with ssd run just as quick as 10th as you well know.

HP z420 with Xeon 1660v4

I have a pc with an amd fx-8350 processor, 16gb Ram, ssd etc and it still works fine, even with windows 11 using the bypasses. I mean it doesn’t get slow even a little bit on windows 11, showing that it handles it very well. Anyway according to microsoft i cannot use windows 11 on a good pc like that, just because arbitrarily they decided this way. It’s beyond me this behavior towards all the users out there.

Some of the free software I've downloaded is available on Linux, Libre Office, VLC player and GIMP with an add-on to make it feel like photoshop. If I want to change to Linux I believe you have to disable secure boot in the settings and set it to legacy. If my SSD goes then I'm going to put Linux on the PC whether it's before the software becomes unsupported or not.

What is the point telling people not to buy older systems because they won't run Windows 11 while posting videos on how to install Windows 11 on non-compatible pcs?

Still running a 4790(non-k) in the office.

Microsoft should just open Win11 to all SSE4.2 CPUs

Can you do a video how to download and use Microsoft Office on Linux operating system.

I have Linux Mint on 2 of my old systems. It runs great. In fact I also ask Chat Gpt how to do things on it.

Greetings from Durban, South Africa.
I'm running Windows 11 Pro x64 on a Dell Latitude E6340 Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-3210M CPU @ 2.50GHz. 8Gb Ram TPM 1.2 - This laptop is 10 years old.

You don't need to install windows, there are other operating systems! Also they are nowhere near as difficult as they used to be to use and many games will still run

Switching to linux is NO LONGER the fix all it once was. The latest kernel has dropped support for a LOT of older hardware. As it stands right now, a fresh debian 12 install simply will not install drivers for a video card that is below a GTX 1080 as they dropped the support for drivers below 5xx series. I have three GT960's and none of them can get the correct drivers on any of the latest debian base, so Xuuntu, Lubuntu, Edubuntu, MX, Peppermint, Mint and several others no longer support older video cards. Zorin OS can still install my ancient GT610 on an even more ancient dual core CPU, but I doubt it will for long. Luckily, decent video cards are becoming more affordable on the second hand market, you just have to be wary of ex mining ones they are usually burned up and useless by the time they hit the secondary market.

There are three primary reasons to buy these old compact ~$100ish systems that are now piling up on pallets over Win11 requirement drama:
・Users that don't have a 2nd computer but need one for servicing walkthroughs, testing software and docker
・Developers that need a 24/7 availability computer to be an application server or network storage system
・Some combination of the above but at the power consumption of a 60W light bulb
I use a 1c/1t Athlon 64 with 2GB, 2 HDDs and a chipdisk as my primary NAS that runs 24/7 availability for all my software package archives, games, torrent subs and pretty much anything frequently accessed. It draws 1KW per month and is severely bottlenecked but good. It's literal eWaste that can barely do virtual machines, can't run Docker because it's just that old and can't run anything that requires 4GB minimum memory.

These junker office PCs are new enough to run circles around this box. They're all multicore, multithread, 4GB+ and can quite literally do anything that I already do from a stamped steel Ryzen workstation coffin. But everyone already knows performance on Win11 would be completely insufferable, which is the main reason they're getting dumped so quickly. Pick one up for your needs and I'm sure you won't be disappointed.

Updates eventually make every computer operating system obsolete. I still have an older Intel Pentium 4 cpu with 32 bit cache architecture. Have run multiple Linux operating systems on it over the years along with Windows XP Professional. Use XP offline and Linux for specialized tasks and internet use. In the year 2024 there are few options with Linux operating systems for this machine, although the latest Debian 12 does have a 32 bit cache version that runs fairly well on this machine. Of course I had to max out the RAM with its 4GB limit (actually 3.2 usable) and add a 2gb AMD Graphic Card to use an HDMI cable connection to a monitor for this machines maximum abilities.

There are a lot of things that Windows provides easier access to compared to Linux. One that from personal experience is file sharing through a hub type switch among several different computers. With Windows connecting an XP machine, Windows 7 and Windows 10 was accomplished by simply following instructions. Good luck trying this with different Linux operating systems. I personally had to spend all kinds of time with no results and only temporary success for a short several month time span with very fast transfer speed using nfs until an update-upgrade changed my set up and everything was lost and back to no file sharing among computers. Finally decided that using a thumb drive to move or copy files from one Linux operating system on different computers to another was the best option.

all my old PC's are plugged into the back of my TV sets as the built in browsers are painfully slow.I'll switch over to linux when necessary.

I can't find my comment asking someone about the licences for Win 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2021. I managed to purchase one online. And it worked. If I had to guess, these are intended for retailers. In my case, upgrading (without losing data) didn't work, although some of my data was present when I did a "clean" install. But it's working nicely. So for people like me who can't upgrade to windows 11 and don't want to use linux instead, this is a good alternative.

If you can use Windows then you can easily learn a Linux distro such as Ubuntu or Mint, but Linux doesn't have a simple way to run Windows-only programs without using things like Wine. Having to configure all Windows games for example to run on your Linux machine is what would be the most difficult thing to transition into for most people, I would think. I also think that buying old hardware is perfectly reasonable depending on certain aspects described in the video, and I'd like to mention that sometimes used PCs can be upgraded with a new motherboard in the same case. I plan on rebuilding my 2018 Brickstation P520 when the time comes, but will have to work around some of Lenovo's genius designs.

If you want to run any games or emulators on these older systems, don't forget to factor in the cost of a graphics card and a beefier power supply, since they usually come with the bare minimum. Also, watch out that you don't buy a compact or "small form factor" system that only takes half-height cards, and has virtually no room to expand it.

Simple. Install 23H2 and if your system wont run 24H2 it wont install the feature "upgrade" Problem solved.

For me i have an old acer s7 laptop and a hp elitedesk 800 g2 mini they are now both running chrome os flex and running really well

You can buy an old computer if you plan to install Linux on it. It's insane that many powerful PC's with Intel Core i7 are unsupported by Windows 11 just because they are too old...