There was also a wave of computers replaced in late 2019/2020 due to Windows 7 going out of support.

Windows 95 has built in networking. You'll have to go back to Windows 3.1 for a version of Windows that doesn't include a network stack.

Sandy Bridge had crazy overclocking headroom. At that time, Intel really didn't have any strong competition pushing them, and those chips were clocked very conservatively if you ran them at spec. You might be thinking Ivy Bridge where they changed the way they attached the heatspreader which reduced the overclocking headroom. Nevertheless, even those chips still overclock well, just not as good as Sandy Bridge.

The problem Intel has now is they have strong competition form AMD, and they're pumping insane amounts of power into their high end chips to squeeze out that last little bit of performance and that's coming back to bite them.

That's not how I manage it. but if I did, I'd have name the desktop folder "Program Manager".

The Windows 10 start menu isn't as good as the Vista/7 one. It's less customizable, stuff just gets dumped into one big list that's sorted (kind of) alphabetical. You can pin stuff as favorites, but it's horribly space inefficient. Most of those shortcuts are tiles, with few of them benefiting from actually being tiles. And your choice is either only a small number of pinned items, or making it huge to the point it is practically the start screen we got with Windows 8. Oh, and the search feature is nearly useless, though I suppose that's more of an implementation problem than a design problem.

I suppose in its defense, the right click menu with the start button is a nice addition. And I guess the shutdown functionality is better than the stupidity that was in Vista/7.

Of course, you've also got the non-Windows options. The XFCE "whisker menu", which actually has a lot in common with the Windows Vista/7 start menu, is also pretty good.

Those numbers don't tell the whole story. The AI miles are all easy driving because that's all AI can handle reliably - things like driving on a clearly marked road in good, clear weather. The human driving miles contain a lot of miles in more challenging driving situations which AI isn't even capable of driving - so it's no surprise really that the human driving pool has worse numbers.

In other words, nothing lasts forever so therefore it's all the same?

The issues I've had with AMD systems generally are chipset/motherboard issues. But you can't have one without the other, so you're kind of stuck. If I could drop an AMD CPU onto an Intel motherboard like we could way back in the day, it would be a slam dunk - the better AMD CPU combined with the stability of Intel's platform. But since I can't do that, I guess it's buy Intel and just put up with their space heater CPUs.

If you're doing that, then what's left? Are you watching comic book movies for the dialog?

Another issue is that people don't trust the airlines to not screw them over. Sure, you could pay more in hopes of better service. You might get that, or you might just end up with the exact same shitty experience but soaked for more money.

At least when you pay bottom tier prices for bottom tier service, you got exactly what you paid for.

I've got a Thinkpad R60 that's probably very much like yours. It runs Windows 10 - used to just fine, but with one of the recent updates it decided it no longer liked the video driver for the ATI Radeon graphics. Granted, this was a driver originally for Vista dating back to 2008, but nevertheless the laptop is now stuck on an old and unsupported version of Windows 10. I have a suspicion if I wiped it and put the 32 bit version of Windows 10, it would be more accepting of the old driver. But on the other hand it runs Manjaro Linux just fine.

It's true that Linux has been dropping support for old and oddball architectures. A lot of the people maintaining this stuff is volunteers, and they don't all have access to exotic hardware or feel the need to support things that very few people actually use. Though on the other hand Linux does support some pretty oddball stuff in the case where there are people willing to maintain that part of the code.

My guess they are doing a bit more than that, otherwise you'd get a similar boost simply by disabling the E-cores, forcing everything to the P-cores which is more or less what you want anyway for gaming.

Probably what they are doing is a mix of:
- The "Turbo Boost Max" feature basically means that Intel has al/ready identified which of the P-cores can boost the most, so be sure to stick the most important thread on that core (likely the main thread)
- The P-cores have hyperthreading, so avoid scheduling something on the second thread that will contend too much with whatever the other thread is doing, or if that first thread is really super important, don't even use the second thread on that core
- Schedule less important things on the E-cores, like background tasks
- The E-cores come in clusters of 4 that have a shared L2 cache, so you kind of have a similar situation as with the hyperthreading where you're going to want to spread whatever threads you're giving them across the clusters if you can, and if the thread is important (but not important enough for a P-core I guess) then try to give it its own cluster

I'd say you're lucky, or there's something you're not telling us. Consumer-level hardware can certainly last that long, but I wouldn't count on it. Hardware from the mid-late 2000's that's been run continuously has usually suffered issues from either capacitors or tin whiskers by now. Ditto for the fans and other moving parts.

There's plenty of inexpensive phones out there. They just don't have a piece of fruit stamped on the back.

Microsoft is off of the every-other-version thing. Instead, they've decided that everything after Windows 7 needs to be crap.