5 ms·

I'm using a (Thinkpad) T42p from a dumpster, works fine. 1600x1200 screen, good keyboard, trackpoint and touchpad, up to 6.5 hrs on a single charge. I put an SS

I'm using a (Thinkpad) T42p from a dumpster, works fine. 1600x1200 screen, good keyboard, trackpoint and touchpad, up to 6.5 hrs on a single charge. I put an SSD in the thing (using a $2 PATA-SATA converter) which makes a world of difference. Since most development happens on servers anyway the relatively underwhelming performance (1.8GHz Pentium M, max 2GB) is not much of a problem. Especially if you plan on developing web apps I can only recommend to use an older-generation machine. While this might sound counter-intuitive, it is an easy way to make sure your programs work well on both older as well as newer hardware.

eloy 10y ago
Ah yes! @OP, if you buy a second hand ThinkPad, buy a 'p' version (T43p, T60p). Those have the high-res UXGA screen, which has almost as much pixels as full HD, just another dimension. But watch out, there are different versions made of the P ThinkPads. Some have the UXGA screen, others the SXGA+ with 1400x1050 which you don't want.
rileymat2 10y ago
>Especially if you plan on developing web apps I can only recommend to use an older-generation machine. This is very specific to the workflow of the developer. If you develop on a Windows Stack (through VMs) you very well could want the extra power to run the Visual Studio debugger. Or you may also want the extra power to run several Virtual machines. There are plenty of good reasons to get a high powered machines for web apps.
- ge96 10y ago
  >There are plenty of good reasons to get a high powered machines for web apps. Having 100 chrome tabs open at once
  - whateveracct 10y ago
    Great suspender ;) unless 100 tabs is your normal working set...
    - ge96 10y ago
      It's pretty dumb, but I found out you can scroll through tabs with your scroll wheel, when hovering over the tabs in a Chrome window. No you quickly lose track of the "right" tab and then you're hunting through them all trying to figure out which one was most recently relevant. But I like that ability to open open open
TheCowboy 10y ago
I used the T60P before upgrading to a W520. The drawback of the T60P is that you're capped at 4GB with a CPU that shows strain if you want to do heavier lifting, but if you are severely budget constrained then it's a decent choice. I think the price difference between the T60P and T42P is negligible at this point too. If going with the T60P or older, then a good SSD is an absolute requirement, IMO.
- i336_ 10y ago
  The main problem with the T60 series is that once they decide to start overheating they're apparently impossible to convince otherwise. I have a T60 here with a fractionally misaligned GPU heatsink. If you take a look at the motherboard (http://i.imgur.com/lUOwImO.jpg http://i.imgur.com/lUOwImO.jpg) you can see that the GPU is covered by the lower-right-most portion of the heatsink - and there are literally no screws holding the heatsink down, only the force of the heatpipe. Mine's ever so slightly misaligned... and the system idles at ~72°C and easily gets to 85°C+ as a result :( I've very carefully tried to bend the heatpipe into different positions (it's rather pliable copper and I'm afraid I'll break it) and while the heatsink is pushing down onto the GPU, it isn't pushing down squarely onto the chip perfectly. So the system has hit its thermal limit once. I use my much older T43 with the T60 sadly sitting to my left collecting dust on its keyboard. I'd love to use it, but apparently the thermal issues are unfixable (I asked a friend who's used ThinkPads for way longer than I have, and they promptly noped out.)
i336_ 10y ago
I'm currently using a T43 I was given it by a friend. I completely completely agree with you regarding the concept that older hardware results in better-designed and faster software. (If I had the money and I could deliver a pallet of T42s to Google's front door as a protest-prank, I would.) I'm hesitant to put an SSD in mine though. The disk is swapping about 65% of the time I'm using the machine (although I have 2GB)... I fear I'd wear through the flash cells in 6 months. I'm completely serious.
- Yetanfou 10y ago
  No problem there, the flash wear problem is overstated to begin with, SSD prices have plummeted so even if you were to wear the drive out in a few years - months would be close to impossible on an old, bandwidth-restricted machine like this - you can just buy a new drive. My (120 GB, Intel) flash drive on the T42p (maxed-out at 2GB) has worked flawlessly for about 3 years now, with no sign of giving up. S.M.A.R.T. data is unreliable on this device, unless you really believe it has an uptime of 904608h+33m+15.150s, 5468289 uncorrectable errors (increasing by 2 per second), etc. More believable are the host write 32MB (81785) and NAND write 1GB (3726) numbers. Media wear sits at 0%. I.e. just put an SSD in the thing and be done with it. Just make sure to get a big enough device if you're worried over write exhaustion as write lifetime is directly related to device size.
  - ge96 10y ago
    Would you get a warning before the SSD completely failed/was unusable?
    - Yetanfou 10y ago
      In theory, yes. In practice, maybe. Techreport did an endurance test on SSDs which gives some insight in the failure mode. The last article in the series can be found here, links to earlier episodes can be found through the article: techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead Some excerpts on the failure mode: ...all of the drives wrote hundreds of terabytes without any problems. Their collective endurance is a meaningful result.... ...The Corsair, Intel, and Kingston SSDs all issued SMART warnings before their deaths, giving users plenty of time to preserve their data... ...Samsung's own software pronounced the 840 Series and 840 Pro to be in good health before their respective deaths... ...If you write a lot of data, keep an eye out for warning messages, because SSDs don't always fail gracefully. Among the ones we tested, only the Intel 335 Series and first HyperX remained accessible at the end. Even those bricked themselves after a reboot. The others were immediately unresponsive, possibly because they were overwhelmed by incoming writes before attempted resuscitation.... ...Also, watch for bursts of reallocated sectors. The steady burn rates of the 840 Series and 840 Pro show that SSDs can live long and productive lives even as they sustain mounting flash failures. However, sudden massacres that deviate from the drive's established pattern may hint at impending death, as they did for the Neutron GTX and the first HyperX....

eloy 10y ago

Ah yes! @OP, if you buy a second hand ThinkPad, buy a 'p' version (T43p, T60p). Those have the high-res UXGA screen, which has almost as much pixels as full HD, just another dimension. But watch out, there are different versions made of the P ThinkPads. Some have the UXGA screen, others the SXGA+ with 1400x1050 which you don't want.

rileymat2 10y ago

>Especially if you plan on developing web apps I can only recommend to use an older-generation machine. This is very specific to the workflow of the developer. If you develop on a Windows Stack (through VMs) you very well could want the extra power to run the Visual Studio debugger. Or you may also want the extra power to run several Virtual machines. There are plenty of good reasons to get a high powered machines for web apps.

ge96 10y ago
>There are plenty of good reasons to get a high powered machines for web apps. Having 100 chrome tabs open at once
- whateveracct 10y ago
  Great suspender ;) unless 100 tabs is your normal working set...
  - ge96 10y ago
    It's pretty dumb, but I found out you can scroll through tabs with your scroll wheel, when hovering over the tabs in a Chrome window. No you quickly lose track of the "right" tab and then you're hunting through them all trying to figure out which one was most recently relevant. But I like that ability to open open open

TheCowboy 10y ago

I used the T60P before upgrading to a W520. The drawback of the T60P is that you're capped at 4GB with a CPU that shows strain if you want to do heavier lifting, but if you are severely budget constrained then it's a decent choice. I think the price difference between the T60P and T42P is negligible at this point too. If going with the T60P or older, then a good SSD is an absolute requirement, IMO.

i336_ 10y ago
The main problem with the T60 series is that once they decide to start overheating they're apparently impossible to convince otherwise. I have a T60 here with a fractionally misaligned GPU heatsink. If you take a look at the motherboard (http://i.imgur.com/lUOwImO.jpg http://i.imgur.com/lUOwImO.jpg) you can see that the GPU is covered by the lower-right-most portion of the heatsink - and there are literally no screws holding the heatsink down, only the force of the heatpipe. Mine's ever so slightly misaligned... and the system idles at ~72°C and easily gets to 85°C+ as a result :( I've very carefully tried to bend the heatpipe into different positions (it's rather pliable copper and I'm afraid I'll break it) and while the heatsink is pushing down onto the GPU, it isn't pushing down squarely onto the chip perfectly. So the system has hit its thermal limit once. I use my much older T43 with the T60 sadly sitting to my left collecting dust on its keyboard. I'd love to use it, but apparently the thermal issues are unfixable (I asked a friend who's used ThinkPads for way longer than I have, and they promptly noped out.)

i336_ 10y ago

I'm currently using a T43 I was given it by a friend. I completely completely agree with you regarding the concept that older hardware results in better-designed and faster software. (If I had the money and I could deliver a pallet of T42s to Google's front door as a protest-prank, I would.) I'm hesitant to put an SSD in mine though. The disk is swapping about 65% of the time I'm using the machine (although I have 2GB)... I fear I'd wear through the flash cells in 6 months. I'm completely serious.

Yetanfou 10y ago
No problem there, the flash wear problem is overstated to begin with, SSD prices have plummeted so even if you were to wear the drive out in a few years - months would be close to impossible on an old, bandwidth-restricted machine like this - you can just buy a new drive. My (120 GB, Intel) flash drive on the T42p (maxed-out at 2GB) has worked flawlessly for about 3 years now, with no sign of giving up. S.M.A.R.T. data is unreliable on this device, unless you really believe it has an uptime of 904608h+33m+15.150s, 5468289 uncorrectable errors (increasing by 2 per second), etc. More believable are the host write 32MB (81785) and NAND write 1GB (3726) numbers. Media wear sits at 0%. I.e. just put an SSD in the thing and be done with it. Just make sure to get a big enough device if you're worried over write exhaustion as write lifetime is directly related to device size.
- ge96 10y ago
  Would you get a warning before the SSD completely failed/was unusable?
  - Yetanfou 10y ago
    In theory, yes. In practice, maybe. Techreport did an endurance test on SSDs which gives some insight in the failure mode. The last article in the series can be found here, links to earlier episodes can be found through the article: techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead Some excerpts on the failure mode: ...all of the drives wrote hundreds of terabytes without any problems. Their collective endurance is a meaningful result.... ...The Corsair, Intel, and Kingston SSDs all issued SMART warnings before their deaths, giving users plenty of time to preserve their data... ...Samsung's own software pronounced the 840 Series and 840 Pro to be in good health before their respective deaths... ...If you write a lot of data, keep an eye out for warning messages, because SSDs don't always fail gracefully. Among the ones we tested, only the Intel 335 Series and first HyperX remained accessible at the end. Even those bricked themselves after a reboot. The others were immediately unresponsive, possibly because they were overwhelmed by incoming writes before attempted resuscitation.... ...Also, watch for bursts of reallocated sectors. The steady burn rates of the 840 Series and 840 Pro show that SSDs can live long and productive lives even as they sustain mounting flash failures. However, sudden massacres that deviate from the drive's established pattern may hint at impending death, as they did for the Neutron GTX and the first HyperX....