> The T60p was released more than 8 years ago. Moore's law predicts the
> performance of hardware doubles every two years. So on average the
> performance of laptops will increase 8-fold every eight years.
That used to be the case, yes. But this exponential improvement stopped
around the time the T60 came out. You can still get a lot more
performance nowadays, but only if your applications parallelize very
well, which is not really the case for webbrowsers.
Sure, a more recent laptop will be significantly faster, but the
16-times improvement predicted by the old "law" is pretty far off the
mark for many (most?) common tasks.
> I think you're remark is true if you substitute 'nearly a decade' for 'a
> couple of years'. I think you're right when you state that most people have
> to buy a brand new computer every two or four years. Don't forget that
> only a minority of users wants to stay at the cutting edge of development
> for more than a decade.
Computers used to be replaced every 3 years or so back when the
exponential improvement was true (and boy, the new machines seemed
*fast*). Nowadays, when replacing an old machine with one 5 years
younger I can't see a speed difference until I actually run benchmarks.
IOW nowadays replacing a laptop more often than every 5 years is only
justified by compatibility issues (read: you're using a proprietary OS
(maybe even one built on top of Free Software, such as Android) and the
vendor dropped support for your machine, specifically because they want
to make money selling you a new one) or because you need something
*different* (e.g. smaller).
Hell, most "computers" used nowadays are significantly *less* powerful
than a T60 (but in exchange, they fit in your pocket).
> I asume Debian GNU/Linux is at least twice as fast and powerful as Windows
> Vista or Windows 8.1.
Historically at least, GNU/Linux hasn't been noticeably faster or more
powerful than any proprietary alternative. It did (and still does)
adapt much better to resource-constrained machines, OTOH.
> Installation of Debian on a three year old, second hand laptop, may
> mark the beginning of a machine's very productive second life! :-)
In my world, installing Debian on a machine is part of its birth, not
its second life.
Stefan "who upgraded to a T61 a few years ago"
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