Time and again I find myself getting back to my Thinkpad X31. It's 2004 vintage, past its five-year extended warranty, and has an Intel processor from back when

Time and again I find myself getting back to my Thinkpad X31. It's 2004 vintage, past its five-year extended warranty, and has an Intel processor from back when their top of the line was still branded as a Pentium. It's the size of a university notebook and weighs 1.6 kg. It's as good as I can expect from the form factor. I have a Thinkpad T60p with a gorgeous UXGA IPS I'm looking to sell because it's too much computer. I have a Thinkpad R50p with a gorgeous UXGA IPS screen I'm going to use instead, but haven't gotten around to setting it up properly yet. I have a desktop with some low-end AMD dual-core, 4 GB of RAM, and a 23" Samsung 16:9 TN screen I've been trying to use as a VM and file server, but the process isn't quite done yet either. Yes, there is a pattern. I have a couple of Nokia tablets (N800 and N810) I use when travelling. The N810 with Opera Mobile comes decently close to duplicating how I use my X31 (after obvious allowances for size difference), but it's been going through some software and perhaps hardware difficulties lately. Still, I was impressed — it got me through two weeks without an x86 machine pretty well. I'm currently considering removing Windows 7 from the X31 (aided by its efforts to implode and steal my files) and replacing it with a basic Linux-based OS like easypeasy. 7 is pretty great when it isn't breaking, but it's almost too much OS for my use. One of these days I'll build my laptop for the ages: a X61s loaded up with 4 or 8 GB of RAM, a nice SSD, and a 1400x1050 IPS screen swapped in. Not yet.