>Fuck off. We have the technology these days to make perfectly acceptable minimalistic hardware solutions, but somehow everything needs to have over 9000 gb ram and octocore processors
Look, we are not talking about 9900K and 2080Ti tier performance. However, there is a baseline of acceptable performance (basically to perform light office tasks/web browsing without persistent freezes or crashing) and the N270 OP is using definitely falls way below that baseline.
What can be considered baseline(or beyond that to a certain degree):
Core 2 Quad/High Clock Speed Core 2 Duo/Xeon equivalent
1st Gen "Westmere" Celeron, Pentium and i3
2nd-8th Gen Celeron, Pentium and i3, excluding the single core Sandy Bridge G440
AMD Desktop APUs, 28nm and newer
AMD 45nm and newer Athlon X4
AMD FX 4XXX
AMD Athlon 200GE
>If people knew how to make properly optimized software, we could actually have pocket computers with a battery life comparable to that of old nokia phones.
They have no incentive to do that, as good as that may sound, it is simply fantasy that is obtuse from reality. Wake up.
>to prove how unnecessary newer hardware advancements are for most uses, and how ridiculously wasteful most people and companies are these days
Let's just say there's security benefits to using a 64 bit operating system. It's not all about performance.
>easily be repurposed for other uses either
I always thought that to myself too, yet I have not managed to find a single use for my bunch of old hardware other than to play and experiment with them. Of course, I am not throwing them away anytime soon, but "easily be repurposed" really isn't the case.
>pulling one of the old laptops from my closet filled that need.
If you mean pulling a Pentium M Windows XP laptop to browse the net, no thanks. They are really frustrating to use. You would really appreciate fast hardware if you grew up with low end slow hardware that have trouble booting Windows.