IKR. My parents are still rocking my old gaming PC from 2006-2007 with a quad core Intel Core 2 Quad and Nvidia 6800GT and it serves them fine. However, by modern standards that PC is an absolute energy hog for what it does. The CPU alone has a declared TDP of 105W (in practice, maybe even more). A modern laptop-grade quad-core Intel Tiger Lake 1165g7 would absolutely destroy it in terms of performance, and at 15W TDP, consume only a fraction of the power.

I love fighting planned obsolescence and reducing e-waste by repairing and keeping stuff working as long as possible but at some point old hardware should be replaced if funds allow it for the sake of energy efficiency and the environment.

That is fair enough. But most of the boxes I bought are fairly efficient, being laptops (usually 45w max under load). Sandybridge was a pretty good platform for its time. It was not until recently that they have iterated out of it. If you had a desktop yeah I would recommend the upgrade. My use case was portability with some very light gaming, and a decent screen for programming. I had done that cutover from power hungry boxes to fairly efficient ones in about 2006. I dumped about 40 bucks off my power bill. My rub with this upgrade for win11 is it seems kind of arbitrary. Mostly TPM. A feature I do not want or have a need for.

> If you had a desktop yeah I would recommend the upgrade

Aye, I was thinking more about older desktop machines rather than laptops, which by their nature are designed to be as power efficient as possible to extend how long you can run off of just the battery.

And again just to restate to others, it's worth upgrading if you can afford it. After I dumped those old Dells, I reckon I saved the nearly the price of a whole PC each year after kitting out with newer gear (until the price of electric went up again).

Apropos Windows 11, it seems there may be ways around the TPM requirements, though not ideal:

https://www.tomshardware.com/uk/how-to/bypass-windows-11-tpm...