How much are you saving? Since I have a job, and would rather trade some money for more time, I choose nicer kit with better warranty. I definitely didn’t do this when I was younger and would run at a much lower cost.

I had more losses and maintenance work back then. In either case, the real specs are what matters. There is more obfuscation of things now than there used to be. There is also more market consolidation and less competition to keep manufacturers on their toes. None of this is great for the consumer.

Can you post a video of the behavior? Stuttering should be relatively easy to capture.

No problems here with long term use. I did run into my first RAM problem with 13th gen build and I’ve been building since the mid-90s. This forum would be full of corroborated posts if there was a genuine problem with Windows 11 and the 13th gen at this point. If you had talked about a hypervisor involved in your scenario then it might have been marginally credible.

Dual-cores are starting to struggle with more modern software that assumes a lot of cores and processes. Back when dual-core was introduced there was much more of a leaning towards multi-threading which is often better on older machines.

These older machines have lower disk I/O too so modern programmers assume faster standards and can be sloppier through complacency.

Both of these things are forgotten when people analyze Linux distros and the like by focusing primarily on RAM.