> Guessing mostly, > > If you take a bunch of computers that is <1 yo and the best os & software you can find. The software choices often work fine, but are actually not so optimised. Sometimes they are brutal in their resource requirements. > > Then you take a bunch of computers >5 yo. And you install the best os & software you can find. The software choices apply many code optimisations that actually take substantial advantage of the full set of hardware features. > > It’s another reason why old hardware is amazing and always worth keeping, repairing and maintaining and even, actively using privately, professionally or commercially.

This is not true. The actual reasons why old hardware works just fine are that CPUs have not improved all that much in single-threaded performance over the last decade or so and RAM does not meaningfully impact performance unless you have too little of it. The only big change has been the transition from HDDs to SSDs. Loading times and boot times have improved a lot because of it.

CPUs now have more cores than before but most software does not take advantage of it.