About two weeks ago, my six-year-old desktop computer was fried by a power surge. It’s been in a local shop since then being repaired, but given its age and that it is a Dell with proprietary parts it will a bit of time before it is back in service. When it returns, it will also be something of a computer of Theseus, but that is not the subject of this post.

What this unfortunate event made me do is switch my main personal computing activities back to my now 11-year-old laptop. This is a computer that I have actively believed to be end-of-life for about two years now and recently installed Gentoo on because I figured I would never use it for anything productive again. Funny how life can be.

In 2024: Is my laptop dying? I don’t know!

It has taken a bit of time for me to get it set back up for my most urgent non-work tasks. Thankfully, my employer provides me with a laptop for my day job. My current personal priorities are a paper submission due tomorrow, reviewing a journal article, and updating a presentation for a guest lecture. So far this has all been more or less fine on my laptop. I have it connected to my desktop monitor and keyboard and mouse for the sake of ergonomics and have been quite happy with the experience. I currently have on the back burner some plans to use the laptop for some audio or haptics things. Reaper and SuperCollider and installed and working with Pipewire. The only hitch is I will need to get a Bluetooth adapter for it since the haptics dev kit I have comes with a very useful board that inexplicably does not have a 3.5 mm audio jack to directly use the onboard class D amplifier, only Bluetooth or serial over USB. Actually, that reminds me of the other frustration of this laptop: it has no USB C ports.

Honestly though, I am surprised by how comfortable it is to use this thing despite 8 GB of RAM being decidedly underpowered for most modern systems. The lack of a dedicated GPU means I really ought to never attempt machine learning projects on it (I learned this the hard way during undergrad), but for nearly all of my other interests it still gets the job done. It makes me wonder how long I could reasonably keep this laptop kicking. The mechanical integrity of the case remains probably the biggest threat to its physical survival. I do think there is a world where this laptop just falls apart one day as I go to open it. In terms of software, I think security would be the biggest threat. Running Linux keeps that at bay for the most part and I am not terribly concerned about x86_64 support being dropped in the foreseeable future, but massive vulnerabilities or the lack of support for new cryptography standards would be serious problems. With all the miscellaneous IoT devices that exist I cannot imagine the old WiFi card in this thing being the bottleneck.

In any case, it is a joy to keep using this laptop. It got me through a bachelor’s, a few jobs, a PhD, and plenty of hobby projects. I just never expected it would get me through these desktop repairs!