bhcordova:
My first home computer was a Commodore VIC20. I even modified a cassette player/recorder to store data for it. I heard last year that it is making a comeback as a nostalgia item, with added USB and HDMI ports! Had I known that there was a Commodore store for a while about a block away from my house at the time, it is possible that I would have bought a Commodore as my first 16 bit PC.

My first was a Vic20 also. 3.5k of RAM if I remember rightly, boosted to a whopping 16k with an expansion pack!
I've got a C64 knocking round in the garage, but I don't know whether it works.

While we are on the subject, and not a few own old laptops running Windows it seems, I would like to re-iterate how important it is to upgrade an old mechanical hard drive to a SSD (Solid State Drive) to make Windows 10 run smoothly and adequately speedwise, even if only SATA I is supported by the hardware. For an old two core CPU laptop with at least 4gb of RAM, it can effectively increase the speed of the computer by 4X, making Windows 10 quite runnable. The frequent culprits in maxing out computers are the browsers which hog RAM memory because they cache all the web pages and their images that you visit into RAM. For humble computers, do not open many tabs on the browser, only a small handful at most. If you run Windows Task Manager, watch the memory usage for the running apps and you will see what I mean. Once your available free RAM starts running low, Windows starts storing the active data in the hard drive. Even though your hard drive is SSD, there is an overhead penalty to pay as Windows has to process the excess RAM data into hard drive storage using the CPU, slowing down the computer considerably. Increasing RAM capacity, then, is also very important because so many apps today are memory hogs, but older laptops are usually limited on this, often at 4gb.

If you upgrade to SSD on a computer with a Linux OS, you will create a computer speed demon, but still be mindful of the browser issue if you have limited RAM.

There is a lot of free Windows software on the Internet to clone an old hard drive onto a SSD. I found EaseUS Partition Master very good especially if your SSD is of slightly less capacity than the original old drive (and of course if there is room for your old data).

I agree with Ted about the ssd. We did this to my 7 year old Mac mini and it instantly became much more usable.

Apple is not for messing with... use as is with original OS version... do not upgrade anything. Mine work flawlessly for many years. Not for hackers. For creatives really.

I never could justify the additional cost of Apple equipment. When I taught computer science for 10 years, the school had all Windows machines so I used Windows at home for compatibility. Some of the Apple fans I have known seemed part of a cult following.

I recently got a new phone and Comcast sold me an iPhone for $200. less than a comparable android. I don't like it and find it much harder to use and less flexible. Going back to android when the contract is up.

While on the subject of SSDs, I should mention that at this point in time there are two types on the market. One has the older SATA interface and is still the most common; the other is the newer NvMe. They are not compatible with each other. Older laptops generally use SATA, but the newest ones, including Macs, use NvMe, usually in the M.2 form which is a small circuit board resembling a RAM module.

The difference between the two is speed, and it is a big difference. SATA was designed for the old clunker mechanical hard drives as a standard way of linking the slow drive to the much faster computer hardware. When SSDs were developed they used the SATA interface so as to easily replace mechanical clunkers by just swapping them.

But SSDs are fast solid state devices, so they really do not need a complicated interface with the computer hardware. This is where the NvMe type comes in. NvMe's interface directly with the computer data bus (PCIe) which the CPU itself uses. In other words, the CPU can almost directly address the data on the NvMe, producing a huge increase in speed.

Unfortunately, NvMe's can only boot on computers that are designed to accept them. Yes, there are PCIe adpters for NvMe. Because the NvMe resides on the main PCIe bus, the motherboard BIOS has to know this to boot from it. Older BIOSes can only boot a drive using the SATA interface. This is also the case with older UEFI BIOSes. There may be hacks for the UEFI BIOS, but that is a whole other project. In fact I have one computer with an older UEFI BIOS, which I boot from a NvMe by using an old clunker only as the tiny initial boot drive for Hackintosh boot manager tools on it from which I then boot Windows on the NvMe. Yes, the speed is phenomenal!

In short, if you are going to buy a new computer, make sure it has or can have a bootable NvMe SSD. Because SATA SSDs are still cheaper, I have seen NvMe friendly laptops being sold at a good price, but they contain only a SATA SSD, not the more expensive and much faster NvMe.

@Ted, most computer users I know don't upgrade parts. They treat the computer like an appliance - They use it until it breaks and then buy a new one. I work for a small company, and we don't even try to upgrade specific parts. It's really more trouble than it's worth.

Ted

Forgive. I did not mean you are not creative by any means.

What I mean by creative is probably better elucidated by saying 'right brain'... I also have a comparison of Mac to PC which is 'right brain' as opposed to 'left brain'. As a 'creative', I am not at all interested in the mechanics, the machine, the inner workings of what makes a computer tic. I could very well wander into that realm, but I choose to spend ALL of my time playing the music, not building the instrument, so to speak. My apps are mostly 'creative (drag and drop)'... Adobe Cloud (publishing: Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, Acrobat), Sibelius (composing), Studio and GarageBand (audio production, sequencing), Movie (video production), and then the great onboard well developed apps for Photos, Calendar, Contacts, Mail, Browsing, Music, Calculator, etc.

It always works, never have problems, buy it and run it out of the box, never think about the hardware ever again (unless a fan burns out or a hard drive gives out which is rare). As bhcordova says, for us types its an appliance. Nothing more.

I always wanted to wander into the 'left brain' part of computing, am fascinated with SSH, line level commands, and programming, but always stopped at the gate which said, 'once you enter here you cannot go back...'. So, I made a permanent decision to see it only as an appliance that fosters the 'creative' right brain in the use of applications.

Hope that helps better explain my devotion to an appliance. Apple is the only 'appliance based computer' that I know of, otherwise I would gladly look at another. I guess that is why Apple's catchphrase was always 'Think Different'. For me, it was 'right brain thinking' when most of the world is 'left brain thinking.'

PS... I do drag my left brain kicking and screaming into my right as I compose fugues and symphonic works, play the pipe organ, tune and repair (real) pianos, harpsichords and an organ pipe here or there, and also craft fine wood and metal works, however!

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