The Tylersburg/X-58 platform has STILL really not gotten totally outdated. I did start with a top-grade board (Asus ROG Rampage III Extreme), and upgraded the proc from the 4c/8t 930 to a 6c/12t X5675 Xeon (server) proc from same gen about 4 years ago.

When everyone started decommissioning their servers from that generation, there was a flood of these chips, which had sold HUGELY when they were new.

It was a $1000 chip, I got it like 5 yr later for $65 I wanna say?

It overclocks very nicely, too, in Winter time I put it up to 4.1GHz ... don't like to overvolt it in the summer here in AZ though ...

Of course I've upgraded my GPU (or GPU's in Xfire/SLI) over the life of this thing ... I dunno ... 10 times probably? CPU can still keep up with games though, esp. high resolution since I'm not expecting super-high frames.

Core 2 Duo though? Wow man ... Only on Linux, I can tell ya that

people getting some mileage out of hardware. There's just too much of it.

my desktop is core 2 duo also, but it's a high end Media Center XP, don't use it online, don't want to tinker with it. It's my universal backup.

This core 2 duo laptop I bought used, heavily used, 8 years ago for $75. i've put $75 in parts into it. It was a high grade HP, about $750 when new. I should take it apart again and replace things, but ... they just reach an age. Great Altec Lansing speakers, can't find another laptop with such bold sound.

i7's have been around for 10 years? Wow. I always heard build your own, but for weekend techies like me, it's no longer feasible.

Free (libre) & open source software is awesome for those of us on a budget, with such a wide range of distributions & desktop environments you can find something to run well on pretty much anything. I just started a week-long trial of Manjaro+KDE Plasma and so far it's going pretty well.

With LibreWriter I can actually open 2 pdf's in the word processor, cut one, paste it to the other, export it as pdf, and print all on the same page. Takes 1/10 the time of a 1993 Panasonic laserjet that took me about 10 minutes to print, and no matter what parts I put in it they failed. If very old, even new printer parts go stale out of the box. The vinyl blade to scrape the surface hardens. Got a lightly used 2006 office printer for peanuts, works great.

After my failed attempts to to get windows to boot on it and not wanting to buy a Windows license I tried several different Linux distributions and ended up staying with Fedora.

I tend to use the Linux laptop sporadically. I play around with some IOT harware/software development on it. Mainly using Python and Flask for coding and web apps.
One of my development board is a small credit card sized board with with 4g of memory that runs Debian Linux. Anytime i get into the mood to work on it I update the the laptop if there are os updates. I'm running Fedora 20 on it now.

Wow, you really are on the cutting edge. You can hookup a keyboard and lcd to it? Does it have a processor?

There are so many Linux distributions. Fedora I've heard of but not the previous post Manjaro. I just wonder how long some of these free OS will be supported, or will be free. I mean there are volunteers behind some of them. Volunteering is great when you start (I volunteer for a service organization), but sometimes I do question my motivation.

My little credit card size single board computer is a discontinued $9 board called chip that was a kick starter funded project. It has an Arm processor, 4g of ram, wifi, ethernet port, bluetooth, micro usb and a mini hdmi port and composite video jack.
It runs Debian Linux. After I set it up the first time i just run it "headless". It is connected to my home wifi and I can remote into it with my laptop or even my phone using an ssh app. But you can connect a keyboard and mouse with usb abd a monitot

There is a better alternative called Raspberry Pi Their boards range from about $10 to $60. The $60 version has a 4-core pricessor.

Their cheapest board the Raspberry Pi Zero W is about $10. It has a single core procecessor with usb, wifi and bluetooth.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/

I'm just amazed. Corporate America is selling us hundreds of dollars worth of technology, and these little Raspberry Pi buggers will perform similar things as long as you use the cloud or peripherals. No fans! Looks like no heatsinks.