Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-04-18, 05:03:
Hard to believe Core 2 Quads are already so old.
I would argue that's because the C2D and C2Qs basically represent the end of a roughly-decade long insane trend of improvement in the desktop computer sphere. Personal computers were expensive and relatively slow-moving in the 1980s, then something happened around, oh, I don't know, 1994-1996 where volumes of Windows PCs sold massively increased, which drove increased investment in part production which drove down prices and improved performance, which drove the software industry to rapidly add features to software that the older hardware couldn't handle, which, to the frustration of parents everywhere, caused 3-4 year old computers to be hopelessly out of date and in need of replacement.
In, say, 1995, a decent system had 8 megs of RAM, a lower-end system had 4 megs. In 2000, a decent system had 128 megs (and might have gotten upgraded to 256 or more for under $100 if you switched to Win2000). In 2006, a decent system had 2 gigs. By 2009-10, a random store system had up to about 8 gigs of RAM... and here we are, 15 years later, with RAM amounts in comparable systems maybe having gone up to 16 gigs.
You had similar improvements in CPU clock speeds, in storage volumes (my early 1995 system had a 420 meg hard drive, my C2D in 2006 had a 320 gig boot drive...), etc.
That all ended with the C2D, the poor reception of Vista, the stagnation caused by the need to support XP/XP systems until 2013-2014, the fact that the software vendors ran out of compelling ideas that would required higher-performance hardware (I don't think Microsoft has come up with a single feature for, say, Word or PowerPoint that can't run on a C2D), etc.
Simple reality is - if you got your elderly aunt or grandmother a C2D/C2Q system in 2006-7 or when they got really cheap in late 2009 when Windows 7 launched, maybe upgraded her to 8 gigs of RAM (although the late-2009 Q8x00 system from a large OEM probably came with 8 gigs of RAM) and maaaybe an SSD at some point, she could still be using that system running the latest version of Windows 10 today, current web browsers, current version of MS Office, and it would perform just fine for her needs. You can't say the same thing about a Pentium 4/D HotBurst or anything else that came before the C2D/C2Q.