Throwing away a working electronic device to replace it with a new one is really bad when you think of the ecological impact. I'm glad that some resist to the urge of buying shiny new stuff.

Stuff I purchased in 2000 is still running like a CHAMP. ASUS Motherboards( half died in the first year, and were replaced ). Once they make it past 1 year they seem to run forever. I have upgraded components like the disk drive, a few of the processors from 2.3Ghz Core2 Duo, to a blaze 3.0 GHz Core2 Duo. And replace thed GPU with what I can as friends upgrade theirs and sell old ones for cheap. Now that they are all running Windows 10 64Bit, I can put up to 8 Gb of ram in them. My kids love it, they can have 4 friends over and play Killing Floor, Men of War, Terreria.

Gaming requires updating (though 32nm cpus are still perfectly fine).

Scientific computing will move to the cloud soon enough, as you either need absurd capabilities, or a recent laptop is generally powerful enough for data science (depending on the usecase).

Hell, I dusted off a 10 year old core2duo HP laptop and it does most of what I need it to (browsing, jupyter notebooks, etc.) fine. The one common app that's painful to use it with is Facebook and other sites that became a sort of monstrosity (the ones with 40 NoScript dependencies you need to whitelist to see content)

Even the input boxes are poorly and awkwardly given these stupid resizing animations.

I've had my HP Workstation for 5 years now. I found an xw8400 workstation off of EBAY for around $400. Oh sure the specs are a little lower than what you'd find on the newer PC's:

- Dual intel Xeon x5355 processors at 2.67GHz

- 16GB of DDR2 RAM

- Two 500GB hard drives in RAID config

- nVidia Quadro FX 4600 768mb video card

But I can expand the RAM out to 32GB and I've already upgraded the RAID drives to an SSD. I can also upgrade the video to 1.5gb or 2gb video card. I'm still impressed how stable its been and how even the 768mb card handles Adobe resources without any lags - I constantly have two or three Adobe programs running at a time which is normally a huge resource hog.

I just fell in love with the performance and the stability of the HP workstations. For a fraction of the cost, and its easily upgradeable so I don't feel like I need to go drop 1K on a new laptop or PC. Also, with such an abundance of these on the market, you can always find a really good deal on them.

[1]: http://www.techspot.com/review/1218-affordable-40-thread-xeo...

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12249317

- Does the number of cores affect general performance or only helps in multitasking and data science? - Is ECC memory worth it (in practice, not in theory)?

ECC arch. is worth the money wherever correctness of the computed results or integrity and stability of running programs is imperative - scientific and engineering calculations, database systems handling precious information (money), etc.

In practice, it seems ECC in a personal computer is not necessary for most people, but in 2009, a study of DRAM errors in datacenters, ECC was found to be very benefitial:

"Across the entire fleet, 8.2% of all DIMMs are affected by correctable errors and an average DIMM experiences nearly 4000 correctable errors per year"

http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf

But this is where Intel irritates me. I want a socket 2011 CPU with both an unlocked (or low core high clock rate) multiplier as well as ECC RAM. For some reason, intel refuses to make such a product.

Hence the unlocked 2011 parts which people routinely run up in the ~4.5Ghz range (myself included) with little issues. The only point of instability seems to be the larger cache, which can have its multiplier independently limited, at which point the stock voltages suffice for a significant clock rate increases. Why intel couldn't bin and sell a 4.2Ghz 2011 part like devils canyon is a mystery.

The DIMM vs ECC point and data you bring up is very interesting. Thanks for that link.

>> Does the number of cores affect general performance or only helps in multitasking and data science

More cores means more data can be processed at the same time. For a gamer, even if you have 20 cores, it doesn't help you because they're after speed. For myself, it's being able to run several Adobe products doing video editing, photo editing, and graphic design, on all the same machine, at the same time. Think of it as workload vs. speed. Workstations are more powerful and built for heavy workloads, whereas gaming PC's are mainly built for speed.

And yes, the main application is in crunching big data sets, CAD design, or anything heavy on the graphical side of things. I definitely saw a big swing in stability when I switched to a workstation with the myriad of Adobe products I use.

>> Is ECC memory worth it (in practice, not in theory)

So in theory this is the advantage of ECC:

ECC (which stands for Error Correction Code) RAM is very popular in servers or other systems with high-value data as it protects against data corruption by automatically detecting and correcting memory errors. Standard RAM uses banks of eight memory chips in which data is stored and provided to the CPU on demand. ECC RAM is different as it has an additional memory chip which acts as both error detection and correction for the other eight RAM chips.

In practice, I can say it for sure helps your system to be a lot more reliable and stable. I've been running my workstation for several years without a power cycle and its been rock solid, no issues, no hiccups, no nothing. As such, this is the main advantage of workstations is their reliability. I also like the idea in some models of stuffing up to 128GB of RAM or running dual video cards.

In the end, with so many people opting for laptops and gaming systems, you can get your hands on a hell of a workforce PC for under $500. The processors and video card are still dirt cheap (around $100). The only mildly expensive stuff is the RAM. I've really good luck with the HP workstations, but that's just me. I'd say dig around and see what you can find. It's also pretty easy to build one of these from scratch since the parts are so widely available.

I do plan to research before spending but want to get a general feel before going in.

One area where CPUs made significant progress was energy efficiency, especially when idle.

I have similar specs on my Asus from the beginning of 2012, Core i5, 8 GB of RAM (originally 4), an SSD (I replaced the dvd-drive), and a nvidia GT540M (2GB) graphics. I bought it for ~500 EUR. If I browse laptops within the same price range, what do I get? Core i5, 8 GB RAM, nvidia 920MX (2GB), HDD, I don't even get a HD screen (or a touch screen - I would like to try those). I would buy a new laptop, but I would have to pay double the price to get something that it is much better than my current one. Until this does not changes, I will stay with the old one.

My 2012 Asus has a i5-2410M, which has a passmark score of 3154 and a TDP of 35W. My recently purchased Dell XPS13 has a i5-6200U, which has a passmark score of 3926 and a TDP 15W. A 25% improvement in raw power, but a 190% improvement (almost a factor of 3!) in performance per watt.

The reality is both are fine for day to day browsing. The real difference is that the power difference means the Dell has a smaller battery, so can be thinner and lighter. Given that I use my laptop plugged in and with a monitor 99% of the time, there's no real reason to upgrade.

Not a knock on you but...surprise surprise Silicon Valley, the world isn't full of MacBook Pros.

Mostly from OEM "neglect" than customer wishes. I used a Android 4.0 tablet until recently. And only had to give it up because the USB port gave out so i can no longer charge it.

The whole 2 year replacement cadence reeks of planned obsolescence.

I disagree. Old PC's are awful. The problem is that a good chunk of new PC's are just as awful. The sub-$400 laptop space is filled with low spec machines that still have 1366x768 resolution screens, low RAM, and slow processors. There has been very little spec change in that space for a long time.

Windows 7 is still popular because most companies have not upgraded to Windows 10 yet. But it is starting to happen. I expect an explosion of Win10 users in the next year.

But the stats cover Firefox users, not average PC users.

I'd guess there's a lot of overlap between (people savvy enough to keep old PCs in service) and (people savvy enough to download a browser that didn't come built-in to the system).

In particular, if you're using an older PC to browse the web, you're pretty likely to want to do some selective content blocking. I believe Firefox has more plugin options for that than the other big contenders.

Similarly, Firefox may be the best choice on Windows 7. But on a brand-new Windows 10 PC, many people may be satisfied with built-in Edge.

I expect those are popular devices for people buying a first laptop for their kids or folks who just need to occasionally use Microsoft Office.

Yes. I use a T61 with a Core2Duo 2.5 Ghz, 3 gb of ram , and a SSD for browsing, Python and some image editing. Yes, it could be a bit faster but overall it's fine and I don't see any reason to upgrade.

Actually I don't want to upgrade because I love the 14" screen with 1400*1050 resolution. It's perfect for reading and programming.

I'm sure there isn't a large amount of Firefox users among people who browse the web in tablets, phones or chromebooks.

With 70% having 4GB or less RAM, I hope this makes it clear to Mozilla people that the 20% memory tax of Electrolysis is simply not acceptable. I'll take less memory usage over benefits of multi processes browser any day.