Not really.
Even for an everyday-use Linux installation would not recommend below this (except UEFI/TPM which I donāt really care at the moment).
However, I suspect those requirements are the bare minimum just to start Windows, but if one wants to use it as well, not just boot it up, will need more decent hardware.
Remember this classic?
Thatās going to be valid all the time
On the other hand, time to time itās good to get some new hardware. What I like especially that newer stuff draw less power. The last 2 years my kids (they are 3) spent in online schools. The first year they used Core2 (Q9400, E8400, E8500) machines with quite old LCD monitors. The monitors needed 30 to 55W, the machines used 70 to 120W, and it was sometimes painfully slow, and because they were constantly much loaded (CPU near 100%) they drew the high power constantly.
In more steps I could buy second hand a set of motherboards with i3 8100, 8GB RAM, and when sold the old monitors, got newer pieces, Fujitsu B22 T7.
Now the machines take 22 to 70W depending on load, but when idling (most of the time) that value settles neer the lowest end 22W. The monitor takes below 11W (brightnes somewhat above minimum, but thatās more than enough in the room).
So we got some new hardware, and freed up noticeable power, 3 (old) computers needed approx. 400W to run, now the 3 (not new, but much more recent) computers need a bit more than 120W to run.
My smallest son required Windows too, because of some games. Interesting observation is, that when Debian is idling, the computer uses ~22W, when Windows 10 is idling, it takes ~25W.
During the last year approx. 1/3 of the price of the new(er) HW returned in using less power.
So yes, sometimes itās time to get new(er) hardware, it may be worth.
Hopefully the online school is over, and never will get back, but the computers stay, just less utilized.
But when they are switched on, run much smoother and more comfortable, than their old counterparts.
Ummm - PAE (processor address extension)? Even Pi4 supports an ARM implementation of PAE (hence why my Pi4 running 32 bit armhf raspbian, can see and address 8 GB of RAM)ā¦ i.e. allowing 32 bit Operating System to address >4GB of RAMā¦ Windows never managed to catch on to thisā¦ but - nearly all the main distro releases for the lasts ~10 years, have defaulted their 32 bit releases to a PAE kernel - which - yeah - can be problem - e.g. sometimes for shits n giggles, I boot up my ThinkPad T42 (these were CLASSY bulletproof machines back in the day) with Fedora 14 or something on it - it wonāt even boot up because T42 cannot do PAE kernel (even though the max RAM I ever ran in one of these was 1.5 GB) but - the kernel is trying to force PAEā¦ I seem to remember 32 bit Debian was the easiest to install on older hardware that didnāt support PAEā¦
What a strange beast PAE really was when you think about it - something introduced that Microsoft Windows (32 bit) couldnāt (or didnāt) take advantage ofā¦ I seem to remember some kludgy hack on Windows Server where you could make SQL server use more RAM maybe - i.e. doing some PAE type thing?.. Anyway - I say strange because PAE was really only used in Linux i686 (Iām pretty sure PAE is one of the things that separates 32 bit platforms from i386).
But overall - I agree with you @Akito - and Iām not even arguing with youā¦
Hey all you 32 bit shit! Just go away and die quietly in that dark corner, weāre fed up of youā¦
Hey āi386ā! The 1980ās call they want their kludgy tech back!
Yes, so the operating system may address more RAM, than usual with a 32-bit system. However, the Raspberry Pi 4 hardware is very much 64-bit and pretty modern overall, too. As far as I know, it doesnāt work, when the CPU is simply not 64-bit capable.
Agree on that, however UEFI is a thing that improves a lot, even when the user might not even notice.
I strongly suspect this and I absolutely expect that.
Indeed. Additionally, it sometimes may be the case that getting newer hardware, that has the same specs on the paper, still may perform better because of seemingly minor details, that improve the hardware, even though it seems to have the same specs as the older counterpart.
This is one of the main arguments for buying new hardware. All the people not buying new hardware forever talk about money, everything is so expensive, bla bla. But if they actually put more effort in thinking, and thought one or two steps further, they would immediately see, that buying new hardware can absolutely be cheaper, because older hardware just claims so much more power and power gets more expensive every year.
Especially, where I live, modern hardware with cheap(er) power draw are very viable and make a lot of sense, because our power prices are extremely high here. For example, itās easily 10x or 20x what the average American pays for his power bill.
So, from my perspective, I rarely understand people using too old hardware.
Sure, I understand using 4 year old hardware.
I also understand that someone perhaps rarely uses their computer, so they donāt need newer hardware.
But if people are starting to seriously struggle with their old hardware, just because itās too old, and want to get that machine running by hook or by crook, then I simply cannot understand that.
I want to tell those people:
Seriously, stop wasting your time on your old dumpster with a CPU and RAM in it and just buy new hardware. You can buy a used but pretty new laptop for about 200 to 300 bucks. Or if you are really short on money, you can even build your own 150 bucks PC that is just as good as a 300 bucks laptop.
And then there are some of us old tragic fanboys of things like Sparc architecture and other RISC platformsā¦
Iāve got a bunch of āoldā sparc systems lying aroundā¦ the main one I only ever turn on is a Sunblade 2500 desktop tower system (Iāve got two - the other is ostensibly for parts) running Solaris 10 - itās got 2 x 300 GB SCSI drives, dual uSparc (4v? 4u?) processors and 16 GB of ECC RAMā¦ yeah - itās a dinosaurā¦ Canāt run Solaris 11ā¦ Iāve also got a Sun Ultra 5 (500 Mhz Sparc) beige desktop on my desk, but havenāt turned it on since I last ran OpenBSD on it (3+ years ago)ā¦ I kinda gave up on the sunblade 2500 when I wasted like 36 hours in total trying to get PovRAY 3.x raytracer to compile on itā¦ the only solaris sparc binaries I could find for PovRAY were for Solaris 8 - and I doubt theyād work even in a Solaris 8 āzoneā (Sun / Oracle ācontainersā - i.e. docker from before there was ever ādockerā) - and ALL the doco for compiling PovRAY on UNIX assumed āLinuxāā¦ Anyway - also got a Sun IPX and 2 x Sparcstation 5s, and a Sun Ultra 1ā¦ cool shit in itās dayā¦
Iāve also got an ancient MCA bus (an early proprietary rival for PCI and EISA - my god EISA was a true piece of crap!) IBM RS/6000 with a 66 Mhz PowerPC ā601ā CPU (and I also have an ancient Apple PowerMac with a 601 PowerPC CPU - I ran MkLinux on it for a bit) - these things could run either AIX or Windows NT 3.x for PowerPC - I finally found a release of AIX 4.x I could run on it - but ran out of steamā¦ probably wonāt ever get around to firing it upā¦
And Iāve got two Silicon Graphics Indys - 64 bit RISC CPU from the 1990ās running 64 bit IRIX UNIXā¦
Trouble with all these ancient RISC āworkstationsā is they all run really annoying loud (and power hungry) SCSI hard drivesā¦
I follow a bunch of vintage computer groups on facebook - but - itās nearly all 8 bit stuff for the likes of Commodore and Sinclair, BASIC interpreters and CPM - ho humā¦ Iām only interested in stuff that ran UNIX and mostly RISC 32 bit (or 64 bit)ā¦
Iād also love a Digital Alpha system to add to my collectionā¦ worked on a few of them over the years, in the late 1990ās you had three choices of O/S, Digital UNIX (AKA Tru64), OpenVMS and / or Windows NT 3.x or 4.x (Microsoft did release betas of Windows NT 5 [AKA Windows 2000] for Alpha - but on the release of Win2000 it was 32 bit i386 only)ā¦
