VB.net still exists, but they basically stopped putting any effort into it, in favor of C#. They had essentially the same functionality for a long time.
U can come work with me as we still run ALL production software off VB. I’ve been on them for 15 years to upgrade our software which was implemented in 1998, and they say that it hasn’t broken yet so there is no need to put any money or resources into upgrading.
I feel your pain. I'm in the same boat and the old guy that writes and maintains all the custom production programs refuses to rewrite any of them into anything else. Though I don't really think that's on him, upper management is notorious for "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." Just ask the critical testing equipment using XP and 48v PLC components 😮💨.
Yep, also upper management will not give us any raises to keep all this old bullshit running. We have lost 5 people in the last two years who got up to 45% increases in pay just by switching companies, and same upper management wonders why we can’t get anyone to stay or anyone accepting low ball ass offers.
I mean who wouldn’t want to be on call 24/7, expected to work while you are on vacation, holidays are mandatory and compensation is half of what national average is. /s
Like 2 years ago I had to rewrite a vb6 application to C#, it had been running for over a decade already but needed a rewrite to continue support.
There's still a few old-timers who use it, and a version of it is used in excel macros I think.
The use in Excel macros has lead to a reputation among security and IT Ops people of it being a stupid and antiquated security risk.
It basically lives in arcane undocumented but business critical spreadsheets that cause SAN damage if you try to reverse engineer them and thus must be allowed to run uninterrogated.
On the flip side office docs with malicious VB scripts in them were a leading attack vector for a while.
I run into dusty old spreadsheet with that stuff every now and then.
Sometimes I debug and fix whatever code it uses, but it's usually not worth my time and I just rewrite whatever the code was supposed to do in something modern.
Especially when it uses some vague dependency or such they're a nightmare to get running
Any code that exists in a form that cannot easily be checked into source control needs to die in a fire. It’s such a repository of Shadow IT and untracked technical debt.
I rewrite a lot of terrible old integrations myself in PowerShell
I work at a company that's over a 100 years old. There's so much of that shit floating around in my department already, I don't even want to know how much there is total.
Jeebus.... Your response gave me flashbacks. I had a ticket escalated to me last year about an Excel macro not working correctly right after someone from our Accounting Dep't got fired. Apparently the task that person the fired person used to do was reassigned to someone on another team. They put in a ticket saying "Hey, this macro isn't working for me". I thought it would be something simple like "Oh, she doesn't have macros enabled" or something like that, but it was some super in-depth issue with the macro returning wrong and NAN results in the spreadsheet. Out of courtesy, I looked at it for a bit and then I did an about-face, walked into my bosses office and just said "Nope. I hope we have someone on the programming team familiar with VB, because I'm not touching this shit.". I ended up being CC'd on the emails between her and Programming, but didn't end up having to do anything, thankfully... Not my circus, not my monkeys.
Ah you’re off by a year. The iPhone was announced the year that *I* started college, 2007. And the over that summer some other kid my age also about to start college called GeoHot released the first iPhone Jailbreak and had a bunch of news articles written about him.
A lot of people involved with the PSP custom firmware community then jumped to the iOS Jailbreak stuff over the next few years.
Until a couple of years ago, my main computer was running an Intel Q9300 (4c4t, 2.5GHz, Q1'08) with a whopping 8GB of DDR2 @ 800MHz.
Honestly? It kinda ran fine with a decent SATA SSD, most of the time when gaming the CPU wasn't even the bottleneck, my GTX 760 died so I "upgraded" with an RX 580.
I even managed to boot up and play cyberpunk. At a whopping 30 FPS, but at least it didn't stutter
It was because these laptops came with an option for 64bit or 32bit OS, so they put in 3gb since it was safe at the time for both configurations. Most things in 08 were still 32 bit and rately leveraged the 64bit arch, that changed with wider adoption of the standard, but really until like 2010/2011 3/4GB of Ram was standard for a lot of budget friendly laptops and desktops.
It's likely 4 with 1GB set aside for "VRAM". Could just be a 2Gb and a 1GB though since that was sufficient at the time it was new and meant they used up existing stocks.
Huh... was duel channel memory not important at the time. It's gone back and forth from my understanding.
With DDR5, it's not super important. DDR4, it depends. DDR3, I believe it mattered.
I never heard of people talking about dual channel memory as an important thing back then in the DDR2/3 era. Certainly not on a Pentium Dual Core Vista laptop.
It was truly a terrible time for low end machines.
I had an old Lenovo mobo I rescued from the work "recycle" pile. I7-6700, not shabby but it only had 8GB of RAM. I bought a second stick and put it into slot 2, right next to the original stick. It helped with multi-tasking, but still wasn't much faster. Switched it to slot 3 and it was a huge improvement. Believe it was DDR3. Boot times cut in half. Might just be the mobo/manufacturer.
6th gen Intel Core is definitely DDR4, but it's also probably correct that dual channel memory mattered in the DDR3 era. I just don't remember seeing it talked about as much, even by PC building enthusiasts. It was in the early Ryzen/DDR4 era I saw more discussion on memory speed and configuration.
It was DDR4 -- I had it at 2133 iirc. Now, I got 32GB running at 3400MHz (with higher timings, of course.) But running Debian, almost all your frequently used apps, including browsers, Spotify, and Steam games get cached. So, it says "150MiB free" but like 28GiB is stored in there. Games launch so much faster than they did on Windows, same with Spotify on the same HW. I know, I know, Linux person is like a vegan and can't NOT tell you they are lol. But with Proton (and yes, I have a SteamDeck) so many more games run natively or with Proton Experimental smoother than they did on the same HW than with Windows, ime. I do use AMD hardware so that might help.
Working at a computer shop in this era, I saw a 50/50 mix of systems with 4GB + 32-bit Windows, others with 2+1GB sticks. But yea, this one surely had 2+1GB if advertised as having 3GB.
I can feel the stickiness of this photo...
32-bit CPUs get you 4GB of directly-accessible RAM with flat addressing. But the PAE CPU extension, introduced in 1995 (13 years before this 2008-vintage laptop was made), lets you use up to 64GB of RAM.
My first laptop has 512mb of RAM and ran Vista Home basic. I understand the need to meet a price point, but holy crap was 512mb RAM and Vista a deal with the devil.
And I tried running Microsoft Flight Similar X on that thing. Lmao. Upgrading to 1.5gb back then was painfully expensive for my budget but worth it
Getting flashbacks to sitting on Windows Live Messenger on one of these trying to ask out a classmate.
Everyone should go through a shitty Acer on Vista experience at least once.
I got a shitty Acer that my dad rescued from a colleague at work. Came with XP so a bit older than the one in the pic.
Well damn, this thing had snapped screen hinges, and it looked like someone had tried to super-glue the screen to the case at a 90 degree angle (I assume). Well the glue had also long failed, so I had to prop the screen on something to be able to use it 🤣🤣
I did replace the hinges in the end, they weren't very expensive. But even when I swapped out Windows for Linux this thing was permanently soooo slow!
There are distros that can and do boot in under a minute and run acceptably well on far less, even if you don't replace the hard drive.
Web broswers? Not so much, unless you only plan on visiting AO3 and Wikipedia.
The difference being that most people are familiar with Chromebooks, or at least the concept, and a LOT of school-aged kids have used ChromeOS by now. So you can often give someone a rehabilitated computer with a new solid state drive and ChromeOS Flex and they will be able to use it right away.
For this reason, ChromeOS Flex is my go-to for the decent hardware that Microsoft won't allow to run Windows 11.
Not the BOFH himself, just a story from /r/talesfromtechsupport.
[Here's the original post from 11 years ago.](https://reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/1ff0w3/110v_can_be_pretty_amusing_or_how_to_tame_your/)
Good thing where I work we force the professors to use our IT issued half way decent laptops. We won't touch anything like this so if they want IT support they have to use our hardware. If I had to support crap like this I'd go mental. I had a hard enough time getting people to let go of their XP computers in 2016.
If you have ever worked for a school board, I can tell you there would be a 10+ year "lifespan" they would try to get Adobe CC to run on that. And then blame you when the quality Acer hardware melts from trying that....
Yep. In 2004 the board of the school I worked at was still using Pentium 75 Toshiba laptops running Windows 98 and would not give them up for some assinine reason.
I literally just last week replaced a desktop PC with almost identical, albeit non-laptop-specific, specs. It was 17 years old and only died when we had some power outages here in Seattle while the client was out of town.
Worked just fine to check their bank website and a single other website that they spend a lot of time on.
I'm always amazed when people don't remove the stickers. They are intended for instore displays, not everyday use.
And there is a certain section of the population that believes that IT equipment should be good for decades of use. And I say that as I type this on a 2013 "TrashCan" Mac Pro. And my Windows laptop is pushing 4 years now.
This. No longer surprised when I see someone still using an abacus in their office....but to go thru years worth of bored users and no one has peeled that wristpad sticker yet?
That's impressive!
Sure, you know that and I know that. We obviously aren't the entirety of computer users, though. Add in that some of those chemicals degrade the plastic on a laptop and why the heck would anyone bother with it on a *work laptop* when the stickers don't cause any harm?!
I mean it depends on what your expectations for “should be good” are, no?
My laptop is going on 13 years and while I can no longer game on it, it works perfectly fine as a browsing/streaming device. I still use it to rip DVDs for my Plex server since my desktop no longer has an optical drive.
For some reason it just feels wrong. I love my CPU/GPU stickers. Sometimes when I have to peel them off laptops at work I just take them home and stick them to my PC. People get really curious when they see an AMD Turion sticker
Eh, not everything can be saved. I installed Debian on my wife's Core 2 Duo (P8600 I think?) MacBook Pro from 2009, the fan nearly sent itself into orbit every time I touched the trackpad. And that was after I cleaned out the entire laptop and reapplied new thermal paste.
Well, MacBooks are notorious for overheating, and that is 15 years old at this point... 15 years is a long time for that kind of hardware to last. It's just that a lot of people think perfectly good hardware is e-waste a lot sooner than 15 years old...
now that gave me back memories, i had one of those acer's with that design but it ran vista I think home premium instead of home basic, idk what happened to it just one day like years ago I couldn't even find it, I think my parents got rid of it and I think without telling me too just bec I think the charger was broken, I would love if I still had that machine from years ago :(
I recently thrown one of these in e-waste. It was from the Windows 7 era - still a Pentium - and still shit.
Admittedly, the screen was busted, and someone bruteforced the HDD out so the connector was destroyed, but even if it was still intact, it would be more suitable as someone's retro software system than anything.
Manjaro for an elderly technophobe is the funniest thing I've heard.
I am waiting to find out the use case to decide whether Windows is needed (I damn well hope not) or if Linux is suitable. If it is, I would usually go Kubuntu, but the "tap to click" option is disabled for some reason running on here, and that's needed considering the left click button is broken.
I haven't tried Lubuntu for a while but I've downloaded the latest to try that out.
Why do you always see people using near 10-20 year old laptops like it is just another Tuesday but never see someone trying to daily drive an iPhone 5? I just find it odd that people are in such a rush to upgrade their phones, but literally nothing else. I personally can’t think of anything my iPhone 12 Pro is lacking for my daily needs, and battery life is really solid.
I mean, if they want Chrome, you might be able to install ChromeOS Flex on it and have a semi-usable experience. Seems to meet most of the minimum requirements for it, though iGPU performance is a bit of a question mark, and you might need to upgrade the RAM to 4GB(seems to be removable at least).
12 years out of support, both by Micro$oft and most software devs, including Chrome and Firefox alike.
As much as Vista might be my second favourite Windows (after 7), it just isn't usable in the modern age.
LOL at this thing being so old that the wifi adapter has ***Draft*** N support.
I bet the event logs in this thing have entries like, "Picture it! Sicily, 1912..."
That gives vipes of our old family laptop. 😅 Took it with me last year for making a backup but before letting it in my network I ran like 5 different anti virus softwares over it to be sure.
Had finally my old Minecraft Beta worlds back + actually some lost media in form of music
Ironically, I think if it were possible to upgrade to 8 GB RAM, it would probably be borderline ok. I just gave away a few very old laptops and they were usable for web surfing and homework. Still slow, but usable. One was a Dual Core processor, and it was not the slowest of the bunch. The slowest was a low end i3 processor with 4 GB soldered in. Yes, the dual core actually (seemed to) run Win10 a little faster than the i3. Go figure!
I would say no. Besides wouldn't Chrome show an error every time it's started that " Windows Vista is no longer supported there will be no Chrome updates from XX/XX/XX" or something of the sort....
You get that when you trying to run on 7....
Hey man it's not that serious. It's just a Windows version.
But damn if the background and layout doesn't instantly tell you which it is that's sadness :)
Processor launched in Q4 of 2008...
HOW IS 2008 16 YEARS AGO
That's the year I started college. iPhone had just been announced and Visual Basic was still a thing.
I miss Visual Basic. I was 10, so a bit behind, but regardless.
What happened to visual basic? I remember using it as a teen to mess around with.
I don't even know. It just up and vanished at some point it seems
VB.net still exists, but they basically stopped putting any effort into it, in favor of C#. They had essentially the same functionality for a long time.
I still maintain apps in VB.NET and it pains me to say you're right.
U can come work with me as we still run ALL production software off VB. I’ve been on them for 15 years to upgrade our software which was implemented in 1998, and they say that it hasn’t broken yet so there is no need to put any money or resources into upgrading.
I feel your pain. I'm in the same boat and the old guy that writes and maintains all the custom production programs refuses to rewrite any of them into anything else. Though I don't really think that's on him, upper management is notorious for "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." Just ask the critical testing equipment using XP and 48v PLC components 😮💨.
Yep, also upper management will not give us any raises to keep all this old bullshit running. We have lost 5 people in the last two years who got up to 45% increases in pay just by switching companies, and same upper management wonders why we can’t get anyone to stay or anyone accepting low ball ass offers. I mean who wouldn’t want to be on call 24/7, expected to work while you are on vacation, holidays are mandatory and compensation is half of what national average is. /s
Like 2 years ago I had to rewrite a vb6 application to C#, it had been running for over a decade already but needed a rewrite to continue support. There's still a few old-timers who use it, and a version of it is used in excel macros I think.
The use in Excel macros has lead to a reputation among security and IT Ops people of it being a stupid and antiquated security risk. It basically lives in arcane undocumented but business critical spreadsheets that cause SAN damage if you try to reverse engineer them and thus must be allowed to run uninterrogated. On the flip side office docs with malicious VB scripts in them were a leading attack vector for a while.
I run into dusty old spreadsheet with that stuff every now and then. Sometimes I debug and fix whatever code it uses, but it's usually not worth my time and I just rewrite whatever the code was supposed to do in something modern. Especially when it uses some vague dependency or such they're a nightmare to get running
Any code that exists in a form that cannot easily be checked into source control needs to die in a fire. It’s such a repository of Shadow IT and untracked technical debt. I rewrite a lot of terrible old integrations myself in PowerShell
I work at a company that's over a 100 years old. There's so much of that shit floating around in my department already, I don't even want to know how much there is total.
Jeebus.... Your response gave me flashbacks. I had a ticket escalated to me last year about an Excel macro not working correctly right after someone from our Accounting Dep't got fired. Apparently the task that person the fired person used to do was reassigned to someone on another team. They put in a ticket saying "Hey, this macro isn't working for me". I thought it would be something simple like "Oh, she doesn't have macros enabled" or something like that, but it was some super in-depth issue with the macro returning wrong and NAN results in the spreadsheet. Out of courtesy, I looked at it for a bit and then I did an about-face, walked into my bosses office and just said "Nope. I hope we have someone on the programming team familiar with VB, because I'm not touching this shit.". I ended up being CC'd on the emails between her and Programming, but didn't end up having to do anything, thankfully... Not my circus, not my monkeys.
Still got vbs in MDT, although there is a github that replaces that for powershell
https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/community/
I wrote vb6 code last year I think. For an access front end to a ms SQL server database
It turned into [VB.NET](http://VB.NET)
Visual Basic, brrr. Turbo Pascal was a thing back then, and it was cool
Ah you’re off by a year. The iPhone was announced the year that *I* started college, 2007. And the over that summer some other kid my age also about to start college called GeoHot released the first iPhone Jailbreak and had a bunch of news articles written about him. A lot of people involved with the PSP custom firmware community then jumped to the iOS Jailbreak stuff over the next few years.
[VB.NET](http://VB.NET) still exists
I was 3, I'm now in college
That's two years after I graduated from college.
I miss the nostalgia, I remember back then my teacher teach me how to code using Visual Basic when I was at middle school
That's obviously false as the 90s was only a decade ago so... ...... 😭🥺😫
2024 - 2008 = 16
SHUT
Weird right? I graduated from highschool in 2005, seems like few years ago but if I counted its almost 20 years ago. 
same.
Jesus I graduated highschool 18 years ago. I did not need this on a Friday sir.
Because I'm 16
NO, YOU ARE A TODDLER. GET OFF THE COMPUTER NOW, SON.
😭😭😭😭😭😭
Here's how to feel it: *that's when the MCU started, with Iron Man.*
Ah... The early MCU.
That’s when Acer build quality…
Said no one ever
That’s a fact, no today’s build medium price will survive this timeframe
Still have a Pentium dual core running a Linux file server. It just keeps on ticking.
Might as well replace it with a $20 raspberry pi. If anything it uses a tiny fraction of the power for the same functionality
Same. Good old core2duo and core quad…
Until a couple of years ago, my main computer was running an Intel Q9300 (4c4t, 2.5GHz, Q1'08) with a whopping 8GB of DDR2 @ 800MHz. Honestly? It kinda ran fine with a decent SATA SSD, most of the time when gaming the CPU wasn't even the bottleneck, my GTX 760 died so I "upgraded" with an RX 580. I even managed to boot up and play cyberpunk. At a whopping 30 FPS, but at least it didn't stutter
3gb of ram oh dear god
Such a weird amount. Wouldn't expect any less from Acer.
32 but install?
64-bit surprisingly. This era of laptop just seemed to love RGB RAM.
I love RGB RAM too, but wouldn't it be hard to see inside the laptop shell?
I could swear I wrote 3GB...
It was because these laptops came with an option for 64bit or 32bit OS, so they put in 3gb since it was safe at the time for both configurations. Most things in 08 were still 32 bit and rately leveraged the 64bit arch, that changed with wider adoption of the standard, but really until like 2010/2011 3/4GB of Ram was standard for a lot of budget friendly laptops and desktops.
It's likely 4 with 1GB set aside for "VRAM". Could just be a 2Gb and a 1GB though since that was sufficient at the time it was new and meant they used up existing stocks.
No, it's definitely 2+1GB. That was a common configuration for the time.
Yikes
Huh... was duel channel memory not important at the time. It's gone back and forth from my understanding. With DDR5, it's not super important. DDR4, it depends. DDR3, I believe it mattered.
I never heard of people talking about dual channel memory as an important thing back then in the DDR2/3 era. Certainly not on a Pentium Dual Core Vista laptop. It was truly a terrible time for low end machines.
I had an old Lenovo mobo I rescued from the work "recycle" pile. I7-6700, not shabby but it only had 8GB of RAM. I bought a second stick and put it into slot 2, right next to the original stick. It helped with multi-tasking, but still wasn't much faster. Switched it to slot 3 and it was a huge improvement. Believe it was DDR3. Boot times cut in half. Might just be the mobo/manufacturer.
6th gen Intel Core is definitely DDR4, but it's also probably correct that dual channel memory mattered in the DDR3 era. I just don't remember seeing it talked about as much, even by PC building enthusiasts. It was in the early Ryzen/DDR4 era I saw more discussion on memory speed and configuration.
It was DDR4 -- I had it at 2133 iirc. Now, I got 32GB running at 3400MHz (with higher timings, of course.) But running Debian, almost all your frequently used apps, including browsers, Spotify, and Steam games get cached. So, it says "150MiB free" but like 28GiB is stored in there. Games launch so much faster than they did on Windows, same with Spotify on the same HW. I know, I know, Linux person is like a vegan and can't NOT tell you they are lol. But with Proton (and yes, I have a SteamDeck) so many more games run natively or with Proton Experimental smoother than they did on the same HW than with Windows, ime. I do use AMD hardware so that might help.
I think the 6th gen was mostly DDR4 mostly but could take LP DDR3 if I remember correctly. Edit: I was wrong. It can take DDR3L (low voltage memory)
> duel channel memory i dont think it's fighting.
Very much just 3GB. 64MB is shared for the integrated graphics.
Working at a computer shop in this era, I saw a 50/50 mix of systems with 4GB + 32-bit Windows, others with 2+1GB sticks. But yea, this one surely had 2+1GB if advertised as having 3GB. I can feel the stickiness of this photo...
Didn't those old mobile GPUs actually use RAM for VRAM? That may be why.
It's the shared video memory. Modern laptops still do it
Only 64MB lmao.
My Asus k50ij from 2010 had 3gb ram... The J was the best buy model and they just scimped on a gig lol, most of the models came with 4
Also the max you could run with in a 32bit OS so not exactly stupid for its day.
Except its 64-bit.
In a software environment built around 32-bit.
Wdym “In a software environment built around 32-bit”
32-bit CPUs get you 4GB of directly-accessible RAM with flat addressing. But the PAE CPU extension, introduced in 1995 (13 years before this 2008-vintage laptop was made), lets you use up to 64GB of RAM.
Assuming the 32 bit os can use it…. 32 bit windows cant, without patching that wasnt available at the time
Some "modern" low end motherboards have a hard cap at 8gb ram even though the architecture allows for more.
My first laptop has 512mb of RAM and ran Vista Home basic. I understand the need to meet a price point, but holy crap was 512mb RAM and Vista a deal with the devil. And I tried running Microsoft Flight Similar X on that thing. Lmao. Upgrading to 1.5gb back then was painfully expensive for my budget but worth it
And it's DDR2!
It's like DDR but double!
I think my iPhone 13 runs on 2gb of ram
There's another gig in all the dead skin.
💀💀
It's impressive for the time, I believe. Correct me if I'm wrong. It's becoming more common with DDR5 to see 12GB and 24GB systems.
Getting flashbacks to sitting on Windows Live Messenger on one of these trying to ask out a classmate. Everyone should go through a shitty Acer on Vista experience at least once.
Take me back.
I did this with one of these, in 2014, with a possibly failing GPU. Aaaah, ATI Catalyst Control Center crashing every 10 minutes, the joys!
That might not have been a failing GPU. CCC was just like that.
Well quite possibly. It did have issues connecting to external displays. I think I put it through its paces a little too hard 😂
I remember how community made better Windows drivers and tools than ATI at that moment lmao
I got a shitty Acer that my dad rescued from a colleague at work. Came with XP so a bit older than the one in the pic. Well damn, this thing had snapped screen hinges, and it looked like someone had tried to super-glue the screen to the case at a 90 degree angle (I assume). Well the glue had also long failed, so I had to prop the screen on something to be able to use it 🤣🤣 I did replace the hinges in the end, they weren't very expensive. But even when I swapped out Windows for Linux this thing was permanently soooo slow!
bUt iT HaS A PeNtIuM!
[https://youtu.be/qpMvS1Q1sos?si=LpPc0Pe5nLP7RZ95](https://youtu.be/qpMvS1Q1sos?si=LpPc0Pe5nLP7RZ95)
One of my teachers regularly uses a laptop like this. Hes one of those people that won't replace it until it breaks.
I am a hoarder too, but there's no way I could main this thing even with Linux on it.
You can, the OS isn't the problem (if ou use somthing with XFCE or LXQT) the problem are the browsers and the webtbh
The web has become so bloated.
Probably wouldn't even run ChromeOS Flex well
There are distros that can and do boot in under a minute and run acceptably well on far less, even if you don't replace the hard drive. Web broswers? Not so much, unless you only plan on visiting AO3 and Wikipedia.
The difference being that most people are familiar with Chromebooks, or at least the concept, and a LOT of school-aged kids have used ChromeOS by now. So you can often give someone a rehabilitated computer with a new solid state drive and ChromeOS Flex and they will be able to use it right away. For this reason, ChromeOS Flex is my go-to for the decent hardware that Microsoft won't allow to run Windows 11.
I'm not a fan of ChromeOS at all, but I've heard it needs DDR3 minimum anyway.
Most likely. ChromeOS Flex is a great way to breathe new life into older hardware but I usually won't fool with a machine older than ten years.
This is why the [etherkiller](http://www.fiftythree.org/etherkiller/) was invented.
I remember the BOFH using the etherkiller to kill a printer that the print management company wouldn't replace. Good times.
Not the BOFH himself, just a story from /r/talesfromtechsupport. [Here's the original post from 11 years ago.](https://reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/1ff0w3/110v_can_be_pretty_amusing_or_how_to_tame_your/)
Sometimes machine euthanasia is the only humane thing left to do.
Good thing where I work we force the professors to use our IT issued half way decent laptops. We won't touch anything like this so if they want IT support they have to use our hardware. If I had to support crap like this I'd go mental. I had a hard enough time getting people to let go of their XP computers in 2016.
I've told more than one customer "sir if this was the family dog, they would have put it down already"
Did they actually use it until now?
If you have ever worked for a school board, I can tell you there would be a 10+ year "lifespan" they would try to get Adobe CC to run on that. And then blame you when the quality Acer hardware melts from trying that....
Yep. In 2004 the board of the school I worked at was still using Pentium 75 Toshiba laptops running Windows 98 and would not give them up for some assinine reason.
I first read 2014...lol
If any of those geezers are still around, it wouldn't surprise me for a second if they were still using Win7.
A school near me still uses windows 7. Ancient versions of microsoft word and somehow minecraft education edition were running on them.
I literally just last week replaced a desktop PC with almost identical, albeit non-laptop-specific, specs. It was 17 years old and only died when we had some power outages here in Seattle while the client was out of town. Worked just fine to check their bank website and a single other website that they spend a lot of time on.
It sounds that way. I haven't seen the user myself - it's been relayed by my partner's old work colleague.
I fucking love that windows theme So refreshing
Vista was the best. And happy lie day.
I'm always amazed when people don't remove the stickers. They are intended for instore displays, not everyday use. And there is a certain section of the population that believes that IT equipment should be good for decades of use. And I say that as I type this on a 2013 "TrashCan" Mac Pro. And my Windows laptop is pushing 4 years now.
This. No longer surprised when I see someone still using an abacus in their office....but to go thru years worth of bored users and no one has peeled that wristpad sticker yet? That's impressive!
Really depends on the stickers, IME. They don't always come off clean so folks leave them on rather than deal with "stickum" left on the laptop.
A bottle of "sticky stuff remover" (literally the things name) is really useful for that kind of thing.
Sure, you know that and I know that. We obviously aren't the entirety of computer users, though. Add in that some of those chemicals degrade the plastic on a laptop and why the heck would anyone bother with it on a *work laptop* when the stickers don't cause any harm?!
I mean it depends on what your expectations for “should be good” are, no? My laptop is going on 13 years and while I can no longer game on it, it works perfectly fine as a browsing/streaming device. I still use it to rip DVDs for my Plex server since my desktop no longer has an optical drive.
typing this on a 4th gen core i3 from 2014. My dad got angry at me for removing that kind of sticker when i was ten.
I like my "Intel Inside" and Nvidia RTX stickers, so sue me.
For some reason it just feels wrong. I love my CPU/GPU stickers. Sometimes when I have to peel them off laptops at work I just take them home and stick them to my PC. People get really curious when they see an AMD Turion sticker
I'm impressed
\*Installs linux\* Perfectly good laptop.
Say what you will about Linux, it's great for keeping older hardware out of the dump.
writing this comment on a pc from 2014. had its 10th birthday a few days ago. it can run minecraft and the sims fine with linux.
Eh, not everything can be saved. I installed Debian on my wife's Core 2 Duo (P8600 I think?) MacBook Pro from 2009, the fan nearly sent itself into orbit every time I touched the trackpad. And that was after I cleaned out the entire laptop and reapplied new thermal paste.
Well, MacBooks are notorious for overheating, and that is 15 years old at this point... 15 years is a long time for that kind of hardware to last. It's just that a lot of people think perfectly good hardware is e-waste a lot sooner than 15 years old...
Right, but I'm making a comparison to the equally old Windows laptop in this post that some are saying to save by installing Linux.
It felt good with Kubuntu even off USB. Just waiting to find out the use case to decide whether it'll be suitable for them.
live usbs usually eat 2gbs of ram just to work. how the fuck did it feel good with 1gb of ram to spare.
When I saw this post, I was thinking to myself "is this a joke?" Then I saw the subreddit
now that gave me back memories, i had one of those acer's with that design but it ran vista I think home premium instead of home basic, idk what happened to it just one day like years ago I couldn't even find it, I think my parents got rid of it and I think without telling me too just bec I think the charger was broken, I would love if I still had that machine from years ago :(
I managed to recreate the aero glass theme in kde, so i am happy.
I recently thrown one of these in e-waste. It was from the Windows 7 era - still a Pentium - and still shit. Admittedly, the screen was busted, and someone bruteforced the HDD out so the connector was destroyed, but even if it was still intact, it would be more suitable as someone's retro software system than anything.
Kudos to Acer for that thing still being alive... Wildly underrated hardware from them starting around 2006.
You can install a lightweight Linux distro such as Manjaro, swap the hdd with an ssd and be good to go by dinner
maybe a bit more ram as well
It most likely won't accept more than 4gb total, though
an extra gb cant hurt
Says 3gb + 1024 shared with video card. That's likely the hard cap
Manjaro for an elderly technophobe is the funniest thing I've heard. I am waiting to find out the use case to decide whether Windows is needed (I damn well hope not) or if Linux is suitable. If it is, I would usually go Kubuntu, but the "tap to click" option is disabled for some reason running on here, and that's needed considering the left click button is broken. I haven't tried Lubuntu for a while but I've downloaded the latest to try that out.
I mean, considering how old it is, minus the dirt and grime I'm kind of impressed
"we'll put more ram in it"
Why do you always see people using near 10-20 year old laptops like it is just another Tuesday but never see someone trying to daily drive an iPhone 5? I just find it odd that people are in such a rush to upgrade their phones, but literally nothing else. I personally can’t think of anything my iPhone 12 Pro is lacking for my daily needs, and battery life is really solid.
my friend uses his iphone 4.
Because I still get updates on my 10 year old laptop and it plays games I want to play fine
Too much RAM for this beast. May need to drop that down to 2 GB of DDR2
Hey I’ve got two of those in the attic still, they were ok at the time.
These things were utterly miserable when they were brand new. How someone is still using that to this day is beyond me.
I sold this model when I worked at circuit city rofl
Install linux and its fixed
That's my desire. Need to figure out the current use case first.
See vista, nostalgia dose. Reality hits, close laptop Take it out back Ticket resolved.
Use supermium and get office 2007 working
I mean, if they want Chrome, you might be able to install ChromeOS Flex on it and have a semi-usable experience. Seems to meet most of the minimum requirements for it, though iGPU performance is a bit of a question mark, and you might need to upgrade the RAM to 4GB(seems to be removable at least).
Your watch is coming to an end. Well done, soldier.
Huh, 250 gigs of memory... how did you manage to hook up a flash drive inside the housing?
"yeah that shit too old you need a new laptop" "why? It was working fine yesterday. Can't you just fix it?"
What's the problem, apart from age?
12 years out of support, both by Micro$oft and most software devs, including Chrome and Firefox alike. As much as Vista might be my second favourite Windows (after 7), it just isn't usable in the modern age.
[www.archwiki.com](https://www.archwiki.com) This might make it usable
I am but a Debian baby.
802.11a/b/g....DRAFT N. Holy crap that thing belongs in a museum
Smithsonian may accept this laptop for their pre-social media exhibit
Facebook, Orkut, MSN
LOL at this thing being so old that the wifi adapter has ***Draft*** N support. I bet the event logs in this thing have entries like, "Picture it! Sicily, 1912..."
That gives vipes of our old family laptop. 😅 Took it with me last year for making a backup but before letting it in my network I ran like 5 different anti virus softwares over it to be sure. Had finally my old Minecraft Beta worlds back + actually some lost media in form of music
[We’re Going to Die!](https://youtu.be/FxIUs-pQBjk?si=k_qrG0IooCmh8Fkr)
3gb ram? What universe are we living in
Ice churns
Install supermium ticket closed.
Science museum called. They want their exhibit piece back now please.
"What kind of operating system does it use?" "Uhhhh Vista!" "We're going to die."
Some part of me believe that a portion of these lunatics are actually playing 4D chess against IT Dept. just to have a laugh
This surprisingly isn't even work related. Just a side thing brought via my partner's old colleague.
Yooo I have an i3-350M version of this laptop from 2010, it's still very usable for most daily tasks with linux (arch btw)
This one felt surprisingly okay with Kubuntu even booted off USB.
She's dead, Jim
Ironically, I think if it were possible to upgrade to 8 GB RAM, it would probably be borderline ok. I just gave away a few very old laptops and they were usable for web surfing and homework. Still slow, but usable. One was a Dual Core processor, and it was not the slowest of the bunch. The slowest was a low end i3 processor with 4 GB soldered in. Yes, the dual core actually (seemed to) run Win10 a little faster than the i3. Go figure!
DDR2 though. We cry.
I still have the 2mb 30 pin SIMM from my Mac Classic II. (I swapped it out for an 8 mb stick! I was so proud of myself!)
It’s windows vista just use internet explorer 6
True big brain.
Holy Windoze Vista Batman!! lol :-)
I would say no. Besides wouldn't Chrome show an error every time it's started that " Windows Vista is no longer supported there will be no Chrome updates from XX/XX/XX" or something of the sort.... You get that when you trying to run on 7....
Just install Supermium, [a Chrome based browser for Windows XP and above](https://github.com/win32ss/supermium)
Vista Home Basic?
As basic as could be.
"Sorry Microsoft has locked window ls vista and you can't use applications on it anymore please buy a new laptop"
Definitely not XP.
Whatever dude. I didn't zoom in. I'm so sorry.
Hey man it's not that serious. It's just a Windows version. But damn if the background and layout doesn't instantly tell you which it is that's sadness :)