What hardware are you using?

[crosscourt]

Its amazing to see that cpus like the third gen Intel i3/i5 Ivy Bridge cpus still work very well in Windows and Linux, with a variety of apps. My wife is still using hers and will probably remain on it till Win10 bows out in 10/2025. I use then with both Win10 and a variety of Linux distros. People dont realize that the difference between the third gen and 6th-8th gen cpus wasnt as large in everyday use as was advertised.
Many gamers are still using 2nd-4th gen Intel cpus for Esport gaming with older video cards with great results. You can get them all day on Ebay in the $35-$55 range, in a variety of form factors.

[chris]

My day-to-day is Asus laptop i5 3337U / 12Gb / 1Tb SSD / 1Tb HDD / Windows 10 Single Language Home
I also have Virtual Box with a couple of Linuxes (Slackware / LMDE5) running approx. permanently.
Works fine for me.

[crosscourt]

I just installed Win11 on my Dell Optiplex 7010 with tirid gen i5 and its running great. Took about 45 minutes and you do get the option to keep your apps. Check out this link for more.

Https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UL_maCWM5bk

[crosscourt]

Dell Optiplex 7010 with a i5 3470 3.2ghz cpu/16gb ram/256gb sata ssd runs very well and improves as Win11 optimizes it a bit over time.

[crosscourt]

Using my Dell Optiplex 7010 SFF as a Linux test rig as its easy to swap drives and the system is still a good performer.

[wove]

I bought a Toshiba backup drive a couple months ago. It lasted about 3 backups then click..click..click and it was dead. It was under warrantee but Toshiba made me jump through hoops to honor the warrantee, then they just refunded my money. I bought a Seagate Backup drive and made my first backup to that. It was snappy at least to me, backing up about 300GB in about 30 minutes. I do hope this one last longer than the Toshiba.

I went with Toshiba to start with, because I have been backing up to a Toshiba drive for several years and it had gotten full. Both Toshiba and Seagate sell 2TB external backup drives for ~$50. Seagate's headquarters is just down the road from me, huge building. I have never had that good of luck with Seagate's drives. Hopefully this will be reliable.

[crosscourt]

Ive never had good luck with Toshiba and have avoided them. Seagate use to be reliable but less so recently. Ive had the best luck with Western Digital drives. Except for my wife whos still using a fairly recent Seagate Barracuda 2tb, I dont use spin drives at all any more.

[wove]

My computers have SSDs in them, but I still use spinning drives for external drives. Being backup drives they are not used that often or heavily and because they are really inexpensive right now. A backup drive gets about a half hour of use a week, so it seems they should last for that purpose for years. And indeed with the exception of the last Toshiba, most have lasted me for years. Once they fill up, I just put them into a box for storage and start a new one.

IBM started making hard drives in Rochester Minnesota, mainly because 3M is close by and 3M had perfected making magnetic coatings, mostly for tape, at that point. Some IBM engineers left IBM and founded Seagate. IBM is long gone from Minnesota, but Seagate has remained. And of course 3M is probably Minnesota's best known company. although General Mills and Kraft are pretty well known as well.

[crosscourt]

I use my older Sata ssds for external storage but most of the average stuff is stored in the Cloud. I keep the more personal things to myself.

[crosscourt]

Going to pick up a Dell E6440 laptop to use as a testing platform for Linux. Being able to pull 2.5 sata hds externally in and out with my fingers will be really handy.