[Freak_NL]

It's also trivially easy to pick up five year old computer parts for a few of whichever monetary unit you use. Ten year old stuff will run perfectly and is often free. Twenty year old? That's entering hobbyist territory. The effort required to support those with modern OS'es is completely out of proportion, and makes little sense, and in terms of power consumption such an old computer is not a very sustainable choice either for the performance you'll get.

[creshal]

5 year old enterprise hardware is only now leaving its warranty cycle.

10 year old laptops can take either 8 or 16 GB RAM and have at least 2 cores + hyperthreading. It'll not just run perfectly, but it'll run even the most bloated Linux distributions or Win 10 just fine.

[detaro]

Right, 10 years ago is e.g. Sandy Bridge Core 2 Duo systems. Thinkpad X220, things like that. Potentially even has USB3 and an SSD already, or can be upgraded.

20 years ago is AMD Duron and Pentium 4, pretty much just getting past single-core 1 Ghz (various 1.x GHz variants were announced during 2001). very different world.

[creshal]

X220 is technically 9 years old, that gives you USB3, two SSDs, and a whopping 16GB RAM.

The exactly ten years old X201 is limited to 8GB RAM, but you can retrofit USB3 with an ExpressCard adapter and it can take one SSD. Two with the optional docking station.

[detaro]

It's not 2020 anymore ;) X220 launched early 2011.

Not all X220 models had USB3 though, only the i7 variant did.

[creshal]

That expands your options even more. Workstation laptops of that age could take 32 GB RAM, unlike the shitty little subcompact ultrabooks that could only take 16 GB.

Man, imagine buying a laptop with only 16 GB RAM today.