Just wondering as computers are sorta my hobby and i like messing around with different ones. I havent in a while due to prices going up such as with ram usually. I dont mess with new tech, but i want to know what you guys do with the crazy prices out there? or are you already set before prices went up? Or are you just lucky in some form?
Just curious.
- abstaining / thinner BCP
- crying and buying overpriced second-hand
- crying harder and buying new
Second hand buying and being friendly with the IT guys at work.
The last time I bought something new out of a store at full price was maybe 15 years ago. I can usually find anything I need by watching the local equivalent to Craigslist, people with lots of money are constantly updating their systems and selling almost new components at bargain prices. A bit of luck and quick action is required, naturally.
The IT-department at work is more than happy to get older gear off their shelves, only the hard drives/SSDs and USB-sticks are off-limits for obvious reasons.
I also like keeping older gear alive with LineageOS and Linux distros. My home laptop is ~10 years old and it runs Fedora smoothly without any problems. My tablet is a Samsung Galaxy something from 2015, the only thing it can’t handle with LineageOS is HD-streaming, which isn’t a problem for me.
I’ve been rediscovering “old” tech. Not necessarily because DDR prices are through the roof, but because some things were genuinely well built in the not-too-distant past.
And sure, I did enjoy servicing a 1980s VT320 serial terminal that I got for free, but I’ve also been examining what an original Raspberry Pi 1 is capable of doing. Did you know the RPi has hardware H.264 encoding capabilities? And mpeg2 hardware decode? With these things being fairly available – just ask some tech friends if they have some to spare – it’s not inconceivably to make a TV frontend to access Jellyfin, in lieu of a Google TV stick or whatever.
Likewise, some pursuits avoid new hardware outright: a FreeBSD-based router runs really well on older hardware, because the drivers will have been tested and rock solid by now. And Asterisk as a PBX software is great if you want to get into telephony. If modern packet switching is more your thing, dn42 is one such environment that you can plug into and pass traffic with other networks.
And if you don’t have PC hardware laying around, maybe try smaller: microcontrollers and embedded/IoT hardware is still fairly affordable, and has a breadth of applications, from home automation to just building things for the lolz. MeshCore and Meshtastic are comms networks built from low cost radios.
Just because some hardware became expensive does not mean the entire hardware space is out of reach, and in any case, the software domain is wide open. In that regard, Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) is timeless. This is akin to trying your hand at Software Defined Radio (SDR) before taking the plunge by buying an expensive ham radio.
The tech field is not limited to just Apple and Samsung. There’s also Dell, and Tektronix, and Linux, and Texas Instruments, and Arduino, and soldering, and KiCAD, and FlipperZero, and HomeAutomation, and IPv6, and more. Find your thing in this great big field!
I keep rp2040 microcontrollers around for keyboards, but I just used one to make a PicoMite VGA, a functional boot-to-BASIC computer.
I realized I don’t need new tech, I find more joy in repairing and using what I can find second hand.
I’m just using my stuff longer
I switched to Linux. And use a middle tier laptop. I settled for not having the fastest laptop. Gaming laptops run to hot and cost twice as much. I usually play indie and older games. My current setup can okay RDR2, but who has time for that? I currently have a Acer with Radeon chipset from last year. It’s a was a no fuss install with Linux that just works. I like Intel and Nvidia, but Intel is slower for the money and Nvidia doesn’t work as well on Linux. Other than the latest games, I can do about anything I want. Recently I designed something in Blender.
I didn’t. I “needed” some hardware to practice for work and just ate it. Won’t be upgrading my gaming server for a few years though.
I took up blacksmithing.
I have a semi decent desktop 12600K, 32gb ram, 4080 with lots of storage. I bought a new Framework FW13 laptop 18 months ago. On the computer side, I think I can ride this out.
However, My phone is on the fritz so I’m gonna have to shell out for a new one soon.
Apart from a new phone, I will just ride this out.
New phone, or “new” phone?
I buy used 2-year-old flagship phones, about every 2 or 3 years, and pay like $200 instead of $1000.
I buy new equipment when I can and make do with old equipment when I must. All the equipment I’m running at the moment was purchased or salvaged before 2021, much of it well before. When hardware fails, I scale back as needed. But I can run a fair amount of webservice from an old chromebook when the max concurrent users is in the mid-to-high single digits. I am definitely skimping on redundancy these days.
I mainly only buy old (like, over a decade old) laptops off eBay so I’m not affected. I’m not replacing any parts of my main PC till they break. I think the current culture of upgrading just to stay up to date rather than because something doesn’t work anymore is incredibly wasteful, especially given the emissions and human rights abuses in the manufacture of PC parts.
Totally agree. I have an inexpensive computer I built for about $500 in 2018. I haven’t upgraded a single component since then, and most of them were the cheapest components I could get.
To date there has been one (1) new game I wanted to play that it wouldn’t run. Reading comments like “oh you won’t be able to play modern games on an old computer” like. But I am able to. I don’t understand what other people need to upgrade all the time, the pace of advancement in components has really slowed down since the 90’s/00’s.
Buying second hand.
I don’t need the latest CPU generation or largest ram sticks for my minipc for self hosting.I’ve been getting into retro gaming. I’ve been buying and playing GameCube and GBA games and I started making my own GBA game as well.
started making my own GBA game
wow nice! How does that work with cartridges? Are there empty cartridges you can write to, or do you hook up the GBA to the PC directly?
I believe those are usually done by modifying an existing ROM, but there are tools to make games from scratch too I think, at least for GBA. It’s pretty neat! The cartridges do have size limits, so if your game / ROM hack is particularly large it might not be ideal, but it’s cool that you can play modern-ish games on an OG GBA (most people emulate nowadays, but lots of people still have original hardware!)
So cool! Let the GBA hunting commence! :D
I upgraded a year ago so I’m fine on RAM. When I needed extra storage I just bought the disks. It’s more expensive but not something I can’t afford.
Good time to check the backlog of older games in your library and just be ok with the reality that your main pc can’t run modern games anymore. Also I turned 2 of my older pc’s to linux machines. Ubuntu lts (12gb ram minipc) and mint cinnamon (4gb ram laptop). Those old machines just got a new life and can still run renpy, rpg maker, html games etc.
