It’s interesting that he notes the power of a core2duo being adequate. I ran a core2duo laptop for 10 years! When I first got the laptop I was running 3d compositing desktops with compiz. By the end of it’s life I was running xfce to make it usable. Same hardware but the software changed to the point where the computer fell behind.
Neutral
Oh yeah, 4 GB would be really rough on Windows 10. The machine I had before this one had 2 GB of RAM and I ran Windows 7 on it. It had a Core 2 Duo E6420 CPU and GeForce 9800 GTX+. I remember things being mostly ok for playing a bunch of games back then but struggled when I tried to run VMs which makes sense given 2 GB of RAM. It was that machine that taught me not to skimp on RAM. The last few years of that machine's life started to get pressured pretty hard with memory requirements and having 4 GB would have solved all of those problems. That's why when I built this machine I went with 16 GB, back in 2014 still running Windows 7.
Likes it
That was such a fun time to be into hardware. For years Intel had the money and relationships to keep the Pentium 4 everywhere even though AMD had the better product. The P4 might edge ahead in video rendering but the Athlon would win overall and use less power. Then Conroe launched and the balance shifted. Even the cheapest Core2Duo chips were competitive against the best P4s and the high-end C2Ds rivaled or beat AMD. https://web.archive.org/web/20100909205130/http://www.anandt... AND those chips overclocked to the moon. I got my E6420 to 3.2ghz (from 2.133ghz) just by upping the multiplier. A quick search makes me think my chip wasn't even that great.
Doesn’t like it
I don't understand the outrage by some people. The Sandy Bridge has popcnt and SSE4.2. If you're using anything older than that, you owe it to yourself to come out from under that rock and treat yourself to a Sandy Bridge or newer. It can't be understated how underpowered and obsolete these CPU's or how outdated these platforms are in regards to connectivity or featureset. You'd also be doing your electricity bill a favor. I've tried Windows 10/11 on a Pentium M and Core Duo and Core 2 Duo. It's abysmal performance-wise and honestly in every other way too.
Likes it
I’ll echo that. Laptops have been “fast enough” for a long time, which is why I can break out an Core 2 Duo laptop from 2008 and still get a lot done with it, but somehow despite far better process nodes and battery tech, battery life is on average worse today than it was in 2014, which is just goofy.
Likes it
I don't know if overclocking pays off much these days. The chips are already taken close to limits with factory settings, so there's not much overclocking potential unless you use extreme cooling. I fondly remember the Core 2 Duo days when I overclocked my CPU with more than 50% using the stock cooler. It's nice to 50% performance for free, particularly when you are poor. I even remember overclocking an old laptop with K6-II (those days laptop CPUs were socketed) by around 15%.