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Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

• JohnJamesRambo 8y ago
  I found the most interesting part at the bottom where he said he got his MacBook back and is still using his old 2007 ThinkPad more than the Mac now.
  • itg 8y ago
    Not surprising, I use a 2018 mbp at work yet prefer my thinkpad x220 which came out in 2011.
  • i_am_proteus 8y ago
    Not at all surprising. Mac keyboards have been coming down in quality, and Thinkpads through the x20 series have absolutely incredible keyboards. If your primary use is typing (coding), you'll probably prefer the machine that's better to type on.
• walrus01 8y ago
  I have a very old Thinkpad X40 convertible which I use occasionally as pretty much a dumb terminal. It runs the latest i386 version of xubuntu. CPU is a single core Pentium M something, 1.5GB of RAM, 40GB hard drive. https://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:X40 https://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:X40 It works totally fine for SSH sessions and a web browser interface to not-very-complicated intranet tools accessed via a VPN, such as ticketing system, network monitoring software, etc. If I want to leave a monitoring display of something running, I fullscreen it in a browser, rotate the thing into its tablet mode and prop it up against something on my desk.
  • phamilton 8y ago
    I wonder how a $150 chromebook would compare. $150 is in the territory of "Drive to store and buy in an emergency".
    • walrus01 8y ago
      Probably a lot faster, in terms of cpu and ability to render resource intensive webpages inside firefox v65. But this was also $40 four years ago. Having a normal xubuntu environment does give an advantage of being able to install a much wider variety of software compared to the chromebook OS, unless we're talking about replacing the chromebook OS with debian + xorg + your choice of desktop environment.
    • sehugg 8y ago
      My Samsung Chromebook 3 is a pretty poor performer, but I love the matte screen and battery life. I use Termux all day long with Typescript background-compiling. I wouldn't run Xcode on a non-SSD MBP, though.
  • initself 8y ago
    X40s are great for journaling. :)
  • moftz 8y ago
    I bought an x41t to use for school a long time ago. It was an ebay special, $100. The slow HDD was a pain in the ass since it didn't use standard 2.5" drives so I couldn't easily swap in a SSD. I had an issue with it where the Wacom touchscreen would have weird interference issues when in Linux but not in Windows. The solution ended up being taking about the display and taping a couple layers of tinfoil to the back of the panel. This oversized doorstop chugged along a few more semesters until I bought an x200t for $100 on ebay to replace it since some mandatory software I needed for school stopped supporting 32-bit CPUs.
  • avhon1 8y ago
    In fall of 2016 (the start of my senior year of university), I bought a Thinkpad X40 for $40. After putting a 32GB CompactFlash card in, installing Debian, and increasing the RAM to 1GB, I started using it as my primary computer. (I didn't have to do that, I had a perfectly-good Thinkpad T430, but I wanted to give the X40 a good try.) (For the record, my X40 had an ultra-low voltage Pentium M Dothan running at 1.1 GHz.) It worked great for me, and did everything I needed or wanted it to do. I actually didn't use my T430 at all that school year, because the X40 worked fine for everything I was doing. Unsurprisingly, it was fine for doing assignments in Python and C. It wasn't perfect with DrRacket -- I had to close and reopen every half hour as memory usage increased -- but it worked, and then I realized I could just use `gracket` or `racket`. I did a bunch of PDF/image editing in GIMP to clean up the lousy scans one of my professors gave us every week to read from. I wrote papers and presentations in LibreOffice. I killed time on reddit. I taught myself how to do CAD in SolveSpace. Most impressively, I ran CompuCell (a voxel-based biochemsitry simulator) in a windows virtual machine, fully interactively and only slightly slower than my classmates' computers. I loved that computer. The battery would easily through one 90-minute class, and I could stretch it through two if I knew I wouldn't have an outlet. The keyboard was perfectly sized for me, and very comfy to type on. The trackpoint worked and felt great. (People didn't ask to borrow the laptop, since it din't have a trackpad.) The display fitted a satisfactory amount of stuff on it. It had real USB ports on it, just as people started having laptops without any USB-A ports at all. Using a laptop that was just able to do everything I needed it to do, I felt a lot more like I was working with the laptop, rather than just on it. (Perhaps this is a similar feeling to what people get when driving Maxda Miatas or BMW M3s -- working with the machine to get the most out of it.) And, in my eyes, it looked great -- a platonic ideal of a laptop. Unfortunately, the X40 has a fatal flaw -- the southbridge tends to die. When that happened, I spent another $30 on a new motherboard. That also died, right around the end of the school year, in late spring of 2017. I decided I didn't want to to through that again, and I gave away the husk of my favorite computer ever -- my own "oldest viable laptop".
• ozzyman700 8y ago
  /tpg/ on /g/ is probably my favorite aspect of 4chan besides /prog/ Thinkpads are wonderful machines with lots of upgrade options. A T61 with an SSD and ram upgrade is quite usable for most everything except high quality video playback .Performance on win10 is ram dependent but with i3 and debian installed ram usage at idle is so so so low (sub gig)
  • andrepd 8y ago
    For what's worth, I get <1GB mem usage with Cinnamon as well.
  • akhilcacharya 8y ago
    I watch a lot of video so streaming + local 1080p+ (or even 4K) playback is a must for me at high bitrates. What's the oldest Thinkpad device that can handle that I wonder?
    • ozzyman700 8y ago
      I would link to /tpg/ but i cannot currently. if you ctrl f /g/'s catalog for '/tpg/' there should be a link to a wiki that gives a great rundown of every model. If you have a complete aversion to 4chan, any model that has a 1080p screen would be a good quantifier, I am not sure how many pre IBM sale thinkpads exist with that requirement though. The W series tends to have the best graphics processors as well. The T series being their general line and the X being their portable smaller laptops.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • MivLives 8y ago
    I wish my T420 wasn't in such bad shape. It works... mostly. But the physical case is beat to all hell because it came through college with me, spent every day in a bag, survived a few high falls to concrete. It'd still be a viable machine if I put in a new battery, SSD, and found a few replacement keys.
• syntaxing 8y ago
  Huge fan of Geoff's post. His X62 post is what inspired to build my own. Though we should probably put a 2017 year stamp on the title.
• larrik 8y ago
  I'm genuinely surprised it doesn't have a touchpad. I don't think I've ever seen a laptop without one, and I used laptops back in the early/mid 90's.
  • sverige 8y ago
    It has the TrackPoint, which is sort of a famous love/hate feature. (I love it.) The ThinkPad is my favorite all-time laptop design. No surprise to me that the author is still using it after getting his MacBook back from the shop.
    • davio 8y ago
      The TrackPoint is the Vim of pointing devices. Need a couple thousand hours to get proficient and then everything else is inferior.
      • xxpor 8y ago
        I have a trackpoint on my HP EliteBook G7, but they didn't include a middle button. So there's no way to scroll without using the scrollbar. I have to wonder if there's a patent reason or something because it seems like such a huge oversight.
        • hakfoo 8y ago
          The Dells at my work have a terrible Trackpoint with middle-button scroll, but it sucks badly. You have to hit the middle button, then scroll, or perhaps the other way around. Ultra-frustrating, and probably bad firmware or driver design. I'm sure the Trackpoint is a third-class citizen for Dell.
    • Anarch157a 8y ago
      I used to love it, back when Thinkpads still had real buttons to go with it. Then they replaced them with trackpad clicking, which makes using it a pain, because it'd usually register movements besides the click, completely defeating the best feature of the TrackPoint, it's pixel-perfect precision. It was never as quick to use as a mouse, of course, but I could always position the cursor exactly where I wanted before clicking.
• markvdb 8y ago
  2011 Lenovo Thinkpad X220 daily user here. Really nice machine really for my needs, running the latest Debian smoothly. I do have a spare ready to take over if needed. Old hardware could always die very suddenly. It's a frugal solution, both cheaper and more ecological than buying new.
  • pingec 8y ago
    I like it too, the screen is poor though
    • mbrumlow 8y ago
      Poor how? I have a nice IPS in x220 and it looks amazing!
      • initself 8y ago
        Too bright! Just not the old school matte thing somehow.
      • tokai 8y ago
        16:9 for a work machine is a bad choice, and the resolution is horrible.
        • floatboth 8y ago
          Unfortunately most things are 16:9. Some MacBooks are 16:10, and Surfaces are 3:2 which is really cool, but 16:9 still dominates :(
          • tokai 8y ago
            Tell me about it. I still rock my old cracked x220. Most new alternatives (that I'm willing to pay for) would give a much worse keyboard, in exchange for an only slightly better screen.
          • robin_reala 8y ago
• bandrade 8y ago
  I use a 2012 Dell XPS 15 daily. I got it as a warranty replacement when my XPS 14 broke. I've given it an SSD and swapped a new battery once. Otherwise it does everything I ask of it except having more than 2 hours of battery life. I've wanted to buy something lighter (the XPS is 5+ pounds) for years but I can't justify it when the 7 year old laptop still works fine.
• Deinos 8y ago
  Still running a Thinkpad x230t here. Outside the screen resolution while not docked, it has been great! It even survived a hard tumble down a flight of stairs 3 yrs ago; the only damage was a small gap along the seam of the external battery.
• seiferteric 8y ago
  I have my ~2008 T61 as my pfsense router now. I was using it until about 2-3 years ago, but I felt it was barely usable anymore. I think anything with a Core 2 duo is past its useful life. Anything just slightly newer with Nehalem? I think would still be usable today.
  • PascLeRasc 8y ago
    I have a Core 2 Duo machine running Elementary I break out once a month or so since it has some cool synth software on it. It's totally usable for me, and that's with a pretty bloated OS compared to alternatives.
    • seiferteric 8y ago
      Sure, for specific applications, almost any computer could still have a useful purpose (hence me reusing my T61 for a router) but we are talking about a daily driver here. In my case, browsing the web became noticeably slower, especially watching videos. I began to suspect my CPU/Intel GPU lacked native support for decoding some newer video formats, but I don't know for sure. This is where its age really began to show though.
    • brett40324 8y ago
      > synth software I use a 2008 MBP 17" because I have legacy versions of music production software that costs a lot, that I can no longer upgrade. It runs great, but it has an occasional memory buffer overload when trying to record and playback too many tracks at once.
• zwieback 8y ago
  At work we get new corporate PCs every few years and I've rejected the offer twice now because the build quality of my Elitebook 8560w is better than the modern alternatives. I put in an SSD and lots of RAM so now I don't want to deal with the hassle of a new one.
• Anarch157a 8y ago
  > Either laptop improvements are well into diminishing returns, or progress in hardware has stagnated, or both. Sort of. The part about diminishing returns is arguably true, but hardware didn't stagnated. What happened is that _software_ stopped bloating and inflating like a balloon, as was the norm through the '80s, '90s and early '00s. When a Microsoft OS requires _less_ resources than it's predecessors (like early Win7 compared to early Vista), you know upgrade cycles will be much longer than before. Unless you're handling high definition video or playing AAA games, of course. But for any other "mundane" task, the only reason to upgrade from a 5 or 6 years old machine would be an un-repairable hardware malfunction.
  • TheWiseOne 8y ago
    > What happened is that _software_ stopped bloating and inflating like a balloon, as was the norm through the '80s, '90s and early '00s. Is that true though? Windows might have gotten more efficient but I think overall most software has gotten worse from a performance perspective. With the prevalence of Electron everywhere, performance doesn't even seem to be a priority anymore. And "native" apps using WPF, etc. aren't as optimized as old school WinForms, MFC style apps (though there are other benefits to be had).
    • hyperpape 8y ago
      It doesn’t strike me as true either. I was just thinking about how my Intel MacBook came with 1GB in fall 2006 (stock was 512 MB, iirc). Granted, that wasn’t a professional machine, but I’d say expected memory for a machine has grown 4x in a dozen years.
      • LyndsySimon 8y ago
        My first desktop was a Compaq Presario CDS 520, in 1994. It was a 486/66, and came with 4 MB of RAM and a 450MB HDD. I want to say my parents paid $2,400 for it, but would have to double check to be sure. A dozen years later would be 2006 - if memory serves, a decent laptop in those days would have run you about $1,200-1,500, and would have come with a Core 2 Duo @ ~1.2Ghz, 2GB of RAM, and a ~40GB HDD. That's a lot more than a 4x increase in specs!
• dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  I SSH into VMs and write email all day. I could get by with a text web browser at a slight loss of productivity during the steep part of the learning curve. I could do my job on a laptop from the 90s if I really wanted to. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
  • initself 8y ago
    Welcome to my world.
• initself 8y ago
  Still rocking T60p, with the NMB keyboard. If you haven't touched an NMB Thinkpad keyboard, you haven't actually used a proper Thinkpad. One thing I found absolutely necessary to make my machine usable in 2019 was upgrading all the specs to the max.
  • initself 8y ago
    I do most of my work in a shell. But I love YouTube also! :)
  • 5166cc9c39fa61 8y ago
    > If you haven't touched an NMB Thinkpad keyboard, you haven't actually used a proper Thinkpad. All these years as a Thinkpad user, and I had no idea of NMB vs ALPS vs Chicony. I thought the variation in the keyboard feel in the machines I own and have used was due to wear alone. Thank you for opening up an entirely new horizon of Thinkpad snobbery.
• jasonvorhe 8y ago
  Last year during Christmas I visited my mother for a day and she still uses my MacBook Pro from early 2008. It doesn't hold much of a charge anymore (it's on it's 2nd replacement battery) but it works delightfully for web browsing, terminal use and I'm sure that I could do most of my daily SRE work on it.
  • robohoe 8y ago
    Up until last year i was rocking a 2007 black MacBook. It did fine for occasional browsing and terminal work. It would’ve rocked even longer if the JS heavy web wouldn’t cripple the web browsers. Also Google stopped supporting Chrome for it. Now it lives as a terminal running Arch Linux. Beautiful hardware. No issues other than chipped palm rest which Apple replaced out of warranty.
• phamilton 8y ago
  Battery life is necessary to do my job, and is pretty much the only reason I get new hardware now.
  • icebraining 8y ago
    New batteries are still being made for old Thinkpads. It's all the same cells anyway, just a different form factor (and a simple internal board).
  • Theodores 8y ago
    Ah, well you need TWO old laptops. When I go babysitting and know that they aren't going to come back when they said they would then the second laptop in my bag comes in handy. Of course I could take the power adaptor instead but a second laptop weighs about the same. Sometimes a bit of time spent with no mains supply makes you value electricity that bit more and how big your carbon footprint really is. You can also decide to dim the screen a bit and do some real work as playing some rubbish video will bring that power meter into the red way before the parents come back. Also it is a good way of finding out how long the battery actually lasts. One imagines there will be four hours or more but then that isn't necessarily so, particularly if running Ubuntu with the bottom of the machine so nice and toasty.
• howard941 8y ago
  Middle management at my $FORTUNE_500 was the opposite, and I'd been using a 10 year old laptop for development with the exception of an SSD upgrade a wonderful IT dude gifted me when he saw that the mandatory malware scanner was eating 100% of the drive bandwidth almost all the time. So if your workplace is good to you with new systems be thankful. I didn't get mine until IT was outsourced and the outsourced guys couldn't figure out how to buy the right SODIMMs for my ancient lappy to get it to 16gb.
  • freedomben 8y ago
    Feel free to ignore if you don't want to answer, but why do you put up with this? Why not go to another company that isn't so ridiculously stingy with hardware?
    • akhilcacharya 8y ago
      Yeah, you're basically causing more problems than you're solving if you're stingy with hardware to that degree. My company is smart about it, IMO - cheapest new MBP 13 variant (no touchbar from 2017), but maxes out SSD and RAM. It's light, thin, and has great battery life for office work and plugs into a provided thunderbolt dock at a desk.
      • JBorrow 8y ago
        For the price of the 2017, 13 inch, non-touchbar with 16GB ram and 1TB SSD you can get the base model 15 inch, with 3x as many cores and DDR4, not LPDDR3 ram. Doesn't really make sense.
        • akhilcacharya 8y ago
          Well we have 512gb SSD not 1TB (forgot the base model offered that) and our workloads aren’t core heavy - we have AWS instances for that.
    • PascLeRasc 8y ago
      I'm not the parent, but I think it's hard to tell what a company's hardware/software policies are. I'm at my second job out of undergrad and both have bait-and-switched me by promising that I'd get to use Linux but having a Windows spinning rust machine waiting for me. I've had to fight just to bring in my own ergonomic mouse. Some companies really care more about controlling you than productivity.
• slothtrop 8y ago
  2010 Dell latitude. Runs just as well as it did when I first got it. Mind you it looks rough around the edges.
  • PascLeRasc 8y ago
    2008 Latitude here, free from my university's surplus. It still runs the Ubuntu flavor of the month just fine.
  • aurelian15 8y ago
    Same here. I got a E5510 when I started University and upgraded it with an SSD and a new battery a few years ago. I really like all the connectors (RS232, VGA, separate microphone and headphone jack, full-sized Ethernet port), and dread the day I have to replace it.
• lqet 8y ago
  As I mentioned in a previous thread [0], I upgraded an old X61 with a custom mainboard produced by a group of enthusiasts in China 1.5 years ago and never looked back. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18273305 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18273305
  • ggreer 8y ago
    I'm the author of this blog post. Soon after I wrote it, I got an X62 and did the daylight LED mod on it: https://geoff.greer.fm/2017/07/16/thinkpad-x62/ https://geoff.greer.fm/2017/07/16/thinkpad-x62/
    • post_break 8y ago
      Damn the bezel around the keyboard is so sexy on that machine. That's exactly what I would want but no one sells something like that off the shelf with a warranty. I still rock my X230 but the display is garbage.
• thorwasdfasdf 8y ago
  With meaningful innovation slowing down, I expect older laptops will become increasingly viable.
  • lostlogin 8y ago
    As long as vendors don’t put crappy parts in them - keyboards being the obvious one currently.
• js2 8y ago
  For reference, a 2007 era Apple laptop would be one of these: - https://everymac.com/systems/apple/macbook_pro/specs/macbook-pro-core-2-duo-2.4-15-santa-rosa-specs.html https://everymac.com/systems/apple/macbook_pro/specs/macbook... - https://everymac.com/systems/apple/macbook/specs/macbook-core-2-duo-2.16-white-13-mid-2007-specs.html https://everymac.com/systems/apple/macbook/specs/macbook-cor... And you'd be able to run up to 10.11 (El Capitan) on the Pro or 10.7 (Lion) on the MacBook.
  • 0utbreak 8y ago
    You can hackintosh some old Macs to run Mojave using http://dosdude1.com/mojave/ http://dosdude1.com/mojave/
    • saagarjha 8y ago
      This isn't really a Hackintosh, since you're running the OS on genuine Apple hardware.
  • cat199 8y ago
    > And you'd be able to run up to 10.11 (El Capitan) on the Pro or 10.7 (Lion) on the MacBook. or switch to any current linux, if you can figure out the 32bit efi booting
    • 0815test 8y ago
      > if you can figure out the 32bit efi booting Multiboot Debian ISO FTW, there. (And rEFInd 32-bit as a bootloader for the installed system.) This trick also helps deal with crappy low-end hardware that is 64-bit capable but ships with 32-bit UEFI and Win 8/10 installs. (They do this, or at least used to, because Win 8/10 in UEFI mode is restricted to running the same architecture that the UEFI is. A 32-bit UEFI only runs 32-bit Windows, and 64-bit UEFI only runs 64-bit Windows. Of course, Linux is not so restricted - and it certainly can boot from 32-bit UEFI and then switch cleanly to 64-bit operation!)
• holri 8y ago
  My wife uses my old ThinkPad X60 from 2007 from day to day, for office work, web browsing, email, video. No problems at all with Debian stable.
• barbecue_sauce 8y ago
  As a former ThinkPad owner, I knew ThinkPads came with those red TrackPoints, but I didn't know you could get them without track pads.
• chx 8y ago
  Heh, there are quite a few people on /r/thinkpad who thinks "something about this machine that causes me to favor it" -- aye, there is, quite a lot in fact. And yes, even the X61 is usable today and the Sandy Bridge based X220/T420/T420s being the last factory machines with the classic keyboard have something of a cult following. As I mentioned many a times before here, from Sandy Bridge to Kaby Lake IPC have only grown 20% and while power efficiency has grown significantly it's been negated by switching to 15W CPUs instead of 35W so it's no wonder the performance is vaguely similar. https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i5-2520M-vs-Intel-Core-i5-7200U/m29vsm153577 https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i5-2520M-vs... Edit: and as a comment below notes, since ThinkPads are typically bought in fleets, any ThinkPad older than three years is typically very cheap on eBay. Buying cheap old ThinkPads instead of similarly priced new laptops at retail outlets is one of those "lifehacks" I suppose. Their ease of maintenance and parts availability combined with the stalled CPU speed growth makes this a very viable strategy. The best ThinkPad of course is the 25th Anniversary Edition having 2017 hardware with the classic keyboard. That's what I am typing on right now. The next best is a hackfest: take a T430s with an i7 iGPU, for some demented reason Lenovo put a Thunderbolt 1 controller in those (also the S430 and then the next ThinkPad with Thunderbolt is the P50 w/ TB3 four years later). Now comes the hacking: add the classic keyboard and also the high quality full HD screen from the T440s using a Chinese converter kit -- the 30 series used LVDS, the panel uses eDP so you need a converter. I have a T420s with that hack. Thunderbolt 1 is obviously slower than Thunderbolt 3 but still, any TB3 eGPU enclosure will work. As the T430s can have two 2.5" SSDs and an mSATA SSD, you can add quite an amount of solid storage to this -- much more than the TP25, the TP25 maxes out at 2.5TB currently, while the T430s can do 9TB. The NVMe disks are of course faster in the TP25 (even though one is x2 the other is x1) but the feeling in everyday tasks is not going to be vastly different -- the big jump is in HDD to SSD. You are also limited to 16GB RAM vs the 32GB RAM in the TP25. And the CPUs are even closer: https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-3520M-vs-Intel-Core-i7-7500U/m50vsm171274 https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-3520M-vs... Your battery life won't be awesome, alas.
  • i_am_proteus 8y ago
    Good point on power dissipation and efficiency-- a T480 might not be substantially faster than a T430, but it's half the size and the battery lasts longer.
• 0utbreak 8y ago
  I see making computer work as long as possible an environmental cause. It took awhile, but I got my company to switch from a ridiculous 2 year cycle to a 6 year and in some cases longer cycle.. At first the higher ups were very skeptical about it. It took a lot of convincing, but we got approval to try it and everyone is still as productive as ever. Mind you, when I purchase, I try to "future proof" them as best we can. The last batch we bought for our general office users, where i5's with 16GB ram and a 512GB SSD. For our devs, I generally set them up with a super-fast ultra-portable(think mac air or dell xps13) as most of their heavy lifting is off-loaded to our private cloud. And so far everyone report very high satisfaction with the setups provided.
• EvanAnderson 8y ago
  It's wondrous to me how viable an old laptop can be. My daily driver is a "Ship of Theseus" Dell D630 from 2008 and it's perfectly usable for the sysadmin work I do. The lack of USB 3.0 is maddening, but that aside it's fine for my day-to-day document prep and admin, scripting, mail, and web browsing. Installing an SSD added years to the machine's life. I'm on my third keyboard and second lid (hinge failure) but both of those are, arguably, wear items. >smile< (I've had a brand new Latitude sitting unused for over a year now. I just can't get excited about getting used to a new keyboard or rebuilding my entire software environment on a new machine.)
• salex89 8y ago
  My dad is a moderate laptop user, but gets easily frustrated with poor performance, sometimes he uses PCB applications for hobby projects.After his last laptop died, we evaluated new vs. used laptops and we found a nicely taken care of T440 with a 3rd gen i5. I've had some additional RAM laying around and a new SSD (totaling 8/128) and the thing flies, he is very satisfied. For the money I don't thing we could have bought a machine with comparable performance from the store. Even the battery holds about an 60-90 minutes which is ok for him. He needs it portable, but not autonomous.
  • salex89 8y ago
    4th gen i5
  • floatboth 8y ago
    > 60-90 minutes That's really, really low for a *40. Unless you mean like 90 minutes of full CPU usage.
    • keithpeter 8y ago
      Getting around 7h to 8h off my X220 with a 'no-name' battery (the larger kind that sticks out at the back). Fine for the last couple of years.
    • salex89 8y ago
      Quite true, but considering the age (I'm not sure whether the battery is original or not), it does the job. The laptop was used, it's not new.
• alkonaut 8y ago
  Most 8-10 year old laptops are perfectly fine if you put an SSD in them. I just upgraded a 2011 mbp from 4GB and spinning disk to 8GB and SSD. The difference is remarkable. It wasn’t usable at all (as in trivial things like logging in could take minutes) and now it’s snappy. Old laptops without such upgrades aren’t really viable these days unless you work all day in a terminal.
  • floatboth 8y ago
    ehh, 10 year old CPUs kinda suck. I upgraded from a 2010 MBA to a Thinkpad X240 in 2015, and it's been much better. The Penryn Core 2 Duo made the Macbook warm and noisy (the joke was that it's called Air because the fans push a lot of air all the time), while the Haswell-ULT chip literally pulls ~1W for the whole package at idle, and the fan often just stays off, and even when it's on it's very quiet.
    • alkonaut 8y ago
      Yes the key is that at certain points in the past there is a nice jump in perf followed by a long plateau. One recent example is in high perf intel laptop CPUs. If you got an i7 laptop 4 years ago and and then again 1 year ago (an i7-7xxx), there was little difference. If you had waited just a little longer for the i7/i9 8xxx gen, it’s suddenly a huge jump. And one other (but not as extreme) example was the 2011 Sandy Bridge laptops such as the mbp. Several years later if you got a new dual core the difference wasn’t that big. (I’m now talking perf only, not temp, noise, idle power,... - I typically don’t even use laptops witiut the power cord attached)
      • robin_reala 8y ago
        Yep. I’ve got a mid-2012 Macbook Air as my personal machine. Was thinking about picking up a new 2018 one only to realise that the CPU had increased by 50% in that time. Substantial, sure, but not enough to bother spending another €1500. Cheaper to spend a few hours optimising the long-running scripts I was using at the time.
  • 0815test 8y ago
• freedomben 8y ago
  I'm assuming OP is running Ubuntu 16.04 since 18.04 lacks support for 32-bit. Sounds like OP is a very casual linux user so maybe would rather not invest any effort into it, but Fedora still supports 32-bit and makes an amazing desktop experience. Highly recommend trying it out. It might render the software complaints moot since a lot has changed in 3 years.
  • nwallin 8y ago
    The standard CPU in the x61 is a T7300, which is a 64 bit CPU. I really don't understand the need for 16.04 at all.
    • keithpeter 8y ago
      Yup, I have an X61s running Xubuntu 18.04 quite nicely. 2Gb and a cheap 64Gb SSD.
      • freedomben 8y ago
        oh haha, I stand corrected, thanks.
• qrbLPHiKpiux 8y ago
  This is the machine journalists (going up against state sponsored entities with unlimited money and resources) use. It's because it's the last machine where the intel chip doesn't have that remote upgrade feature put into them since.
• teekert 8y ago
  My Vaio FE11s from 2006 also still works well. I'm not really surprised. Especially when you do text based stuff. During the time I wrote my MSc thesis (in 2005) in LaTeX, I used a very old Toshiba Satellite (it looked like this Toshiba Satellite Pro 420 from 1996 [0]). It had a 2GB hard drive so I had to carefully select the software packages that Slackware wanted to install. But it worked a I wrote parts of my thesis on it (blackbox window manager, nedit as editor iirc), I probably still could. But it's getting harder and harder to find 32 bit images. I like Ubuntu Mate 18.04 32 bit though, I recently installed it on my Eee 1000he (2009, Intel Atom CPU) for my son. I could even stream Netflix in Firefox. Not smoothly though. I wanted to fit it with an SSD... but I believe there are no PATA SSD drives :) (at least not in my possession currently.) Not sure if it would make a difference also given the speed op PATA. [0] http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/23468/Toshiba-Satellite-Pro-420-CDS-810/ http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/23468/Toshiba-Satelli...
  • wtallis 8y ago
    > but I believe there are no PATA SSD drives There are a few. They mostly use the same controller chips that CompactFlash cards use, and you may be better off getting a high-end CF card and an adapter. SATA to IDE bridge chips also exist, but I doubt you'll find an adapter packaged correctly for use in a notebook.
  • bluedino 8y ago
    OWC sells the 'Aura Legacy' PATA SSD (macsales.com)
  • listenallyall 8y ago
    +1 for Sony. This comment is written on a 2009 VAIO FW-4xx series w/big beautiful 16.4-inch FullHD screen, HDMI, dual-band wifi, SD slot, VGA, Bluetooth, dedicated GPU. Upgraded to USB 3.0 via the PC Card slot (eSATA too). Amazing keyboard and touchpad. Yes I've upgraded RAM and added an SSD (both upgradable without opening the case). Best part of my VAIO: it runs Win7 Pro. Compared to a 2015-era Dell Latitude running Win10 Pro, it is more stable (Chrome crashes regularly on Win10, seems 8gb RAM is not enough for Win10), better touchpad (new ones lack edge scrolling), quieter & less active fan, way less behind-the-scenes activity (updates, unwanted services, malware checks, etc), Aero's look & feel is so much better than Win10. I really, really, can't understand Microsoft's strategy in removing so many of the good things about Win 7. Does anyone prefer the Win 10 UI over Aero??? The (very minor) cons of this 10-year old laptop: Blu-Ray drive no longer works. No sound except through headphones. The manual "wireless" switch no longer deactivates wifi/BT. Battery life was never very good, the machine is pretty much useless if I am not near a plug. Really wish Sony was still in the laptop game.
• tzhenghao 8y ago
  +1 on a Thinkpad. I have a T420s that's almost a decade old now, and it still works pretty well (the beast still has a drive bay!). I swapped that out for a SSD that's configured to be the main boot drive few years ago. I think it'll last at least another 5 years.
• wwweston 8y ago
  My daily driver is mid-2012 pre-retina MBP. It's entirely adequate. I fear the day it dies because there are no more non-glossy MBPs, and I'm either going to have to make the choice to give up a matte display or give up macOS. It did recently go down and I pulled out a 2008 MBP. Mostly adequate, lag does start to show, though. My guess is that it's an issue of constrained memory (max 4GB?) as much as processor. Tops out at El Capitan, though, so it won't be viable too much longer. Linux seems to be the slow lane of the upgrade treadmill.
  • tjr 8y ago
    I still use a 2010 MBP. I think it's at the end of MacOS X support. The battery doesn't last long. Rather than spend money buying a new battery, I should probably replace the whole laptop. But it still works!
  • JonathonW 8y ago
    Recent-ish (10.7 and later) versions of macOS tend to fall apart under memory pressure with traditional hard disks-- more so than previous versions did or than Windows does on similar hardware. My hunch is that they changed something in their virtual memory subsystem to takes advantage of characteristics of SSDs that isn't quite so friendly when your drive has significant seek times. A consequence of this is that an SSD upgrade in machines of that era can be quite dramatic, especially if you're memory-constrained. Might not be too helpful in the 2008-era machine (an SSD might be bus-limited there, not sure what generation of SATA those machines have), but the impact on a 2012-era machine (if it shipped with a traditional hard disk) can be huge.
    • CPLX 8y ago
      Yup. I have an office full of Mac mini’s from the 2014 series. The real basic ones with a SSD swapped in are totally fast and viable machines for just about anyone that’s not doing video or data intensive stuff.
    • gshubert17 8y ago
      My 2009 iMac, though not a laptop, benefitted from a swap to an SSD from the HD. At the same time I added more ram to total 8 GB. It works very well for me.
• nonamenoslogan 8y ago
  I'm using an i7, mid-2010 17" MacBook Pro at work, its been upgraded to 16Gb of RAM and an SSD installed but otherwise its stock and works great. I am a software-programmer and use ColdFusion builder, SQL (Azure Data Studio), and various other tools like TextWrangler, RDP, Firefox, Chrome, etc. The only complaint I have is that it won't run Mojave so no "Dark-mode" but that's ok--having used this laptop for a year now, if I can squeeze another year out of it I'll probably qualify to get a more recent model.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• shereadsthenews 8y ago
  Not sure it's really true that a 1997 laptop would not have been OK for 2007. I nursed a PowerBook G3 "Pismo" along until at least 2007. It had Rage 128 graphics and 1024x768 display just like this ThinkPad. Yes it had an upgraded G4 CPU and replacement batteries, but the X60 on which I am typing this message has a $$$ SSD in it, too.
  • ams6110 8y ago
    I used a 12" PowerBook G4 daily up until a couple of years ago.
• rjsw 8y ago
  I still use an ASUS A6000 from 2006.
• danans 8y ago
  An related question that is also interesting: What is the oldest laptop that you can install an run a recent open source OS on. It doesn't have to ha e a fancy desktop
  • pjmlp 8y ago
    I think anything with a smartphone like specs would be able to handle something like PuppyLinux.
  • jdboyd 8y ago
    2006 would still be very usable and wouldn't require any special desktop or distribution. I think that as you go back further it will be web browsers that cause pain before Linux itself does.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • danans 8y ago
    Looks like I prematurely hit submit on this. Full comment posted elsewhere
• pjmlp 8y ago
  This laptop is an Asus dual core from 2009, initially released with Windows 7, currently running Windows 10, maxed out to 8GB and an 1 TB SSD. Still quite fit to run VS, Eclipse, Android Studio. Only issue that the fan has already seen better days. No wonder that PC makers cannot sell enough machines nowadays to keep investors happy.
  • dhimes 8y ago
    I have an Asus (Model UL50V) from 2009 with an Intel Centrino- 4 GB RAM. It's my everyday machine. It is getting slow at many things (but a recent hack to Thunderbird settings helped a little). I dual boot Linux Mint 17.2 (Ubuntu 14.04 IIRC), although I haven't actually booted windows in years. I have a Toshiba Satellite for travel, windows 10, and in virtualbox I have a Mint system that basically recreates my work environment (which is usually Fluxbox). The one good thing about about using the old system is that using Virtualbox isn't annoyingly slow. I am looking forward to upgrading my work box to a linux-native desktop (System 76 or such) and joining the modern age! I was hoping to outwait Spectrum/<forgot other name> but now that is looking hopeless?
• vikingcaffiene 8y ago
  Good ol' Thinkpads. I have a T410 running Linux that is honestly fine for most of the work that I do day to day. If the screen was better I honestly couldn't come up with many reasons to get anything else. The keyboard alone makes it worth it. In light of apple becoming less and less of a viable option, I have been wondering if we are going to start seeing a wave of these older machines come back into play. There's already a pretty healthy mod market out there, maybe our needs are so niche that we need to build our setups out ourselves? These older Thinkpads are modular enough that it's certainly possible. The nerd in me is excited about the possibilities. The pragmatist is a wee bit terrified. :)
• hrkucuk 8y ago
  2010 thinkpad x201 user here. Archlinux + XFCE4 setup. Everything works pretty smooth. Sometimes i am using software like Blender3D that requires decent hardware. Everyting works fine as a hobbyist. As long as it does not fall and break apart, it is gonna work forever. But hey, it is thinkpad so...
• danans 8y ago
  A related question that is also interesting: What is the oldest laptop that can run an up-to-date, internet connected OS (i.e a museum device with the same OS from 1991 doesn't count). It doesn't have to have a fancy desktop, but it does have to support connectivity to the internet, and run all the latest security patches and updates. This is different than the article because optimizing productivity isn't an objective, just how long the device can be updated before it becomes impossible to do so anymore, analogous to vintage car maintenance.
  • danbolt 8y ago
    I'm no expert in the matter, but I'd imagine the Lubuntu team has a lot of insight into that[1]. [1] https://docs.lubuntu.net/lubuntu_installation_on_old_computers https://docs.lubuntu.net/lubuntu_installation_on_old_compute...
  • shereadsthenews 8y ago
    I've got a 486-class machine with 32MB of RAM running an up-to-date unix as my firewall. It really depends on what you want the machine to do for graphics and javascript and whatnot.
    • LeoPanthera 8y ago
      Which unix?
      • shereadsthenews 8y ago
        It evolved from a stripped down Debian originally to Core Linux today. It's just a firewall, so it hardly needs any software.
        • LeoPanthera 8y ago
          Whether Linux is "a unix" I suppose would be a big debate. :)
  • 8y ago
• eschneider 8y ago
  I use that same Thinkpad X61s as my personal laptop. Got one used for $100 and added a big drive and it's good-to-go for linux work. The keyboard's great and I actually like the 4x3 display. Best thing, if anything happens to it, it's a _cheap_ laptop, so not so bad.
• neferbast 8y ago
  And here I am using a HP elitebook 8440w from 2010-2011 as my main computer here .__. Though laggy sometimes, I use it daily with an avd + vscode without many issues.
• tibbon 8y ago
  Simiarly, I still have a 2009 Macbook Pro laying around that I sometimes use and it's just fine. I mean, it's not fast but it's fine.
• Tepix 8y ago
  One killer feature that recently appeared in notebooks is a Thunderbolt 3 port for eGPUs. They have the potential to lengthen the lifetime of the notebook.
• dfox 8y ago
  As far as I have anything that could be called daily work laptop it is ThinkPad X200s with maxed-out RAM and cheap SSD.
• rotrux 8y ago
  I don't really understand how we've all been shocked by this. From https://www.maketecheasier.com/why-cpu-clock-speed-isnt-increasing/ https://www.maketecheasier.com/why-cpu-clock-speed-isnt-incr...: > "Thanks to the limitations of physics and the current transistor material designs, increasing clock speed is not currently the best way to increase computational power." In around 2006, the CPU industry became a commodity industry & innovation has since come in the form of Instruction Level Parallelism (ILP) rather than the engineering of faster CPUs. That shift is responsible for your 10+ year old laptop still being viable.
  • bgorman 8y ago
    Forms of ILP have been around much longer than 2006 e.g. branch prediction. The main industry "event" that concluded the "frequency wars" was the commercial flop of the Pentium 4. Modern high-performance CPUs are not a commodity industry - due to the requirements for a high IPC, only Intel, Apple, and AMD can really claim to have "industry leading" products.
    • rotrux 8y ago
      > "Forms of ILP have been around much longer than 2006" You're absolutely right, but what I'm trying to get across is that the CPU design problem has largely shifted from being capacity-based to being efficiency-based, and this happened pretty silently in 2006. Sure there is still innovation capacity in the CPU industry, but it's qualitatively not the same kind of approach which evolved the Apple 2 into the iPhone. Personally I look at the energy efficiency of the human brain and think there's a lot of performance improvement to be done for synthetic processors, I just don't think major developments will be as easy, fast, or predictable as they were before individual CPUs kind of stopped getting faster.
• cr0sh 8y ago
  I bet if somebody held a gun to my head, and I was at least allowed to dial in via modem to a *nix server with node.js on it - I could probably do my current job, to a certain bare-bones level... ...using my TRS-80 Model 100. Don't get me wrong - it would be a nightmare and no fun, and some things just wouldn't be possible. Though that's definitely not what the author had in mind...
  • stcredzero 8y ago
    Someone needs to make a modern day equivalent of a Model 100. By that, I mean a highly portable instant-on computer one can do remote terminal work on with seemingly endless battery life. The first programming job I was ever paid for, I did a large part of dialed in through a modem over landlines. Emacs was fantastic for that! (Because it's an OS masquerading as an editor.)
    • wlesieutre 8y ago
      iPad Pro with a Brydge keyboard? https://sixcolors.com/post/2018/12/brydge-pro-keyboard/ https://sixcolors.com/post/2018/12/brydge-pro-keyboard/ The OS has a lot of limitations on doing local development work, but if you're connecting to a remote server you get a great quality screen and remarkably long battery life. Apple lists "Up to 10 hours of surfing the web on Wi-Fi, watching video, or listening to music." Keyboard has its own battery (default connection is bluetooth, you can use a USB-C cable if that's not reliable enough). It's not clear to me if it can use its battery to charge the iPad or not. Either way, you can always carry a USB-C battery pack to extend the iPad's life even further.
      • stcredzero 8y ago
        I have an iPad mini with a Microsoft folding keyboard that I rather like. I guess I could buy a really stout Otter case with my iPad mini and refresh the battery (getting old) and it would serve fairly well in that role. The thing about the Model 100, was it was pretty robust. Not mil-spec, but pretty darn good for a consumer device. I've read about it being used by researchers someplace like Antarctica. iPads are pretty good that way, but they do feel like a luxury device. I'd like to see more "consumer-level stout" devices. Give me plastic: much more robustness without added weight, and let me just not worry about knocking the thing around.
• bitwize 8y ago
  I frickin' love my 2010 ThinkPad T510. It was my workhorse for about eight years, until I got a desktop PC to use as a daily driver. The ThinkPad is still a secondary machine, and it runs NetBSD now.
• jadbox 8y ago
  My first development laptop was an 1984 IBM model. It's screen was black-n-white only, and it weighed like a bag of bricks. However, I wrote an amazing amount of Borland C++ on the road with that beast. (rest-in-peace)
• grawprog 8y ago
  2007 doesn't seem that old. I've got a desktop I built in 1999 that I continue to actively use. The only upgrades its ever gotten was a cable tuner card, fuck knows how long ago, a second hard drive and some extra RAM around 2007 or so. It runs ubuntu server now, but for a long time i had a full desktop running on it. Xorg is still installed if I really need a desktop environment for some reason. It would take a long time to do things, but there's no reason i can't do pretty much anything I do on my current laptop on there.
• anonu 8y ago
  My 5 year old MBP is still awesome .... So much so that I feel bad I bought the latest MBP. It's not "much" better. I often recommend people buy a ten year old full-frame dSLR. Quality photos are more dependant on the photographer and maybe the glass... Megapixels aren't that important with a full frame sensor made in the last 15 years...
  • duado 8y ago
    A $300 Canon 5D with a fast lens like a 28/1.8 or 35/2, in good light, outperforms most of what you can get today in any similar price range.
    • dingaling 8y ago
      The 5D uses an old battery format that is increasingly difficult to source. It also is becoming difficult to service. So that $300 bargain might have to be disposable. I usually recommend the previous generation old for DSLR. At phase-out Canon manufactures enough spares for an anticpiated five to seven years of servicing.
  • therealmarv 8y ago
    That's only true for RAW files... the signal processors behaviour made huge steps forward in the recent 10 years in many conditions <- this is what you pay for in new DSLRs beside megapixels. I would better recommend a good second/third generation Nikon APS-C (which is not that old) and save also money on good/cheaper APS-C lenses this way.
    • pier25 8y ago
      You also get better low light performance, more dynamic range, and video capabilities.
      • therealmarv 8y ago
        You can have more dynamic range with a Nikon APS-C than with a fullframe Canon. That's not dependent on the optics its a technical thing on the sensor.
• distant_hat 8y ago
  I have a ~2003 iBook still going strong.
• Causality1 8y ago
  Maybe the failure of moore's law will finally make manufacturers diversify in form and features. It'd be nice to be able to buy a laptop with a 4:3 screen and a clitmouse.
• slezyr 8y ago
  > Ubuntu 16.04 doesn’t have a built-in dictionary or thesaurus What OS has build-in dictionary? There is no need to preinstall all the programs. Even if it had one it would be just one more thing to remove and install another dict (everyone has different needs).
  • marmaduke 8y ago
    Macos has a nice built dictionary and thesaurus, and it’s something I miss on the other platforms. Not everyone has time to play around with a thousand software packages.
  • mruts 8y ago
    OpenBSD has a system dictionary and a default spell checker: spell(1). I’m guessing the other BSDs do as well. As an aside, this is why I think the BSDs are so great. They are complete systems with great documentation and great coherency.
  • linguae 8y ago
    NeXTSTEP came with the Digital Librarian, which included a Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary and a thesaurus. Beginning with Mac OS X Tiger, macOS has shipped with dictionaries. I make heavy use of the Japanese dictionaries. Unfortunately I've had a difficult time finding offline dictionaries for Windows and Linux. Microsoft used to offer offline dictionaries (Microsoft Bookshelf had a dictionary, and I believe there was an Encarta dictionary as well), but last I checked, Microsoft no longer offers an offline dictionary. It used to be possible to buy a CD-ROM version of the Oxford English Dictionary, but last I checked there is no longer an offline digital version of the OED. As far as Linux goes, the dictionary software that I've seen largely relies on either public domain dictionaries (such as the 1913 Webster's dictionary) or open source dictionaries (such as Wiktionary), but I'm unaware of any Linux dictionaries that use commercial dictionaries. I'm willing to pay for good offline dictionary software for Windows and Linux (bonus points if I could find good Japanese dictionary software); that's one of the things that keeps me on the Mac, actually.
  • pier25 8y ago
    macOS
• batbomb 8y ago
  I have the x61s. Up until about 3 years ago I still used it quite a bit. It was always my travel companion too. Mostly I just don't use computers at home much, otherwise I'd probably have used it more. It's a bit fragile now, dropping it a few times over 7 years can do that. The dual core core 2 duo and 4GB of RAM, and 9 Cell (160GB 7200RPM drive) battery meant that it was good enough for just most things for a very long time. Of the computers I've had, it rivals the 2015 MBP Retina with being a favorite of all time. I'd possibly give it a slight edge over the MBP due to size and keyboard. It was also nicer than the later X2xx series, IMO, which is why I went with macbooks later.
• samirm 8y ago
  Not a daily driver, but still use my Dell XPS from 2011 and it holds up relatively well. Planning on putting in an SSD and replacing the thermal paste to give it some extra life.
• ChuckMcM 8y ago
  Nothing quite illustrates the death of Moore’s law quite like this does. I brought out an old thinkpad for a similar reason and was able to do everything I needed to do.
• bmaupin 8y ago
  I've kept a 2008 MBP running by upgrading the RAM and putting in an SSD. But I'd never buy another one since (at least according to Apple's website [1]) the last upgradable model was released in 2012. [1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201165 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201165
• soulnothing 8y ago
  A majority of the bottle necks I've encountered have been ram. Maybe battery life secondarily. This is from a performance perspective. For software development work flow. Not trying to run the entire environment on my laptop. Barring of course something like constant video encoding or high cpu usage. Past that we're seeing improvements in weight, and display. I've used thinkpads for a while. Starting off with a T430. With a quad core, and 16gb of ram and three SSDs. The two pain points were the display and weight. I upgraded to a T440s, which fixed the screen and weight. But the ram became a deficit (12GB max). I worked around this by RDPing into a dedicated server I colocated. This offered a beefier desktop on demand (32GB ram + hexa core). But this also faltered because of poor internet connection outside of my home generally. The thin client works very well, as long as you have good internet. But good internet is very difficult to find. I upgraded to an A485, most recent ryzen. It clocked in around 1200 after upgrades. All my older thinkpads were around 200 total. It's not worth it. It's not just the core components. The dock was an extra 200. I picked up older thinkpad docks and carried the same model for several generations. I got them used I think for under 50. I had one at every junction of my house. Dock to the media center, desk, bedroom, etc. From what I've seen the next thinkpad line is going to be even less upgradeble. Which is a real shame. That feature really extended the life of any business model.
• rudolph9 8y ago
  I just got a refurbished Thinkpad x230 and it work great with an ubuntu 18.04 install. It has 16GB of ram, a 512GB ssd and a Intel Core i5-3320M CPU @ 2.60GHz x 4 and cost $350 on newegg. The difference between this machine and a $1500 latest model machine strikes me as marginal and it's silly to drop four times as much money for something that is marginally faster.
  • berbec 8y ago
    Stick with that x230! My x240 maxes out at 8gb of ram. :(
  • rb808 8y ago
    I had to look that up. Looks great, but screen is a little smaller than I hoped. https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?item=9SIA5WM5R10355 https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?item=9SIA5WM5R10...
• everdrive 8y ago
  I do my gaming on a Desktop from 2011. It's a Core i5 with 12 GB of Ram (one bay is dead) and a Nvidia GTX 960 card. I'm running Linux and Proton/Steamplay, and play a few AAA games from 2016. I'm not really confident that my framerate would improve much if I bought a new PC.
• HumanDrivenDev 8y ago
  I'm simply not interested in where laptops are going. I'm a healthy adult male, so a few hundred grams of weight is not an issue. I also find thin laptops very uncomfortable to use in certain positions where you balance it against your body. I really should buy a 'clunky', 'heavy' laptop before they all disappear and all that's left are wafer thin machines with soldered-on everything.
• fixvzbdjzis 8y ago
  I used an old SGI Fuel (700Mhz, 2GB Ram) as my daily driver @ work until 2013. I would rdesktop to use heavy websites, but other than that it rocked. Stopped using it because I graduated and I didn’t want to pay the electricity bill or keep a jet engine running at night (light sleeper) If anyone here had successfully converted an SGI to a fanless SSD unit, let me know!
  • unxmaal 8y ago
    You might check on https://forums.irix.cc/ https://forums.irix.cc/ . I have an Origin 300 rackmount with upgraded Noctua fans, and it's quiet enough to not be a bother.
    • fixvzbdjzis 8y ago
      Thnx. Now that Nekochan is dead I’m really lost in the Irix world. Btw, do you know if there’s a way to make the boot drive a network drive (not the install drive)? I thought I remembered the post-doc in the lab keeping a half dozen O2s alive w/out replacement drives. But I might be wrong
• amanaplanacanal 8y ago
  I have a laptop which is 6 years old (not a thinkpad) which I was on the verge of tossing because I needed a new keyboard for it. Except for the broken keyboard, it's still a great machine, but the unavailability of parts was a problem. Luckily I was able to find one and had it shipped from China. 10 minutes later it's as good as new. I found others on ebay, but they weren't actually available any more. I had a similar experience recently for a cellphone, but instead of hardware it was software. I can't get security updates for it anymore. Except for that, it's still a great phone.
• kemitchell 8y ago
  I daily a 2010 Lenovo T420s. Replaced the disc drive with a solid-state drive and the CD drive with an auxiliary battery pack. Maxed out RAM. Runs Debian 9.x with dwm. Perfectly adequate for software development. On the odd occasion I need more, I shell into a virtual private server.
• kakwa_ 8y ago
  Just a few months ago I replaced nearly the same laptop (Thinkpad x61 in my case, with SSD and 4GB RAM upgrades). It has served me well for 6 years (I bought it secondhand), but it started to definitely show its age. It started to have difficulties playing youtube videos and the like, these consuming a lot of CPU, and consequently battery life started to drop to below 2 hours (plus the aging battery didn't helped), and fan noise started to get somewhat annoying. It also had some scars like marks on the screen or partially broken keys (I've not necessarily treated it well, compressing it in bags or having dropped it on more than one occasions). It is still usable, and I will convert it for other uses (mpd server probably). But it was time to replace it with a newer laptop, the new one is a secondhand Thinkpad x250, and it's definitely an improvement, quiet, more powerful, 6 to 8 hours autonomy. I hope it will last about as long as the x61 that served me so well.
• meuk 8y ago
  I have replaced the battery and the HDD by an SSD in two old thinkpads, and they work very well. In particular, they have a nice key layout and type a lot better than my 1600 dollar Dell XPS, which is more important to me than a full HD screen.
  • elagost 8y ago
    Older laptops tend to be very serviceable and repair-friendly. I use my VGA ports, USB, SD card, and Ethernet ports all the time. Newer laptops, from what I've observed, fall into two categories: either a)they are not shy about imitating a MacBook Air, or b)enter the size/weight class of a Toshiba Qosmio[0] from 2007. [0] https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834114635 https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E1683411...
• pier25 8y ago
  > I’m not sure if I’ll stick with it, but there’s something about this machine that causes me to favor it. The keyboard.
• abujazar 8y ago
  Hey, did anyone hear about Spectre?
• konamicode 8y ago
  I have a 2008 MB (first of the unibody models) and it would be OK if not for hardware no longer being supported by the newer versions of macOS. This means I am unable to install .NET Core 2.0 or some of the newer Node versions which is a shame.
• bfrog 8y ago
  X220 still is my small collection of computers, could easily use it daily still
• isostatic 8y ago
  2010 thinkpad t410s, alas the screen hinges have broken so I don't take it on the road as much as I'd like. Works fine with ubuntu 1604
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• javchz 8y ago
  T430 owner here. Even if it's a Ivy Bridge CPU, the machine works amazingly well. I love it. In maintenance terms It's almost a desktop. I have replaced the dual core cpu for a quad core, double the RAM, switch the hdd for an SSD, get a better battery, remove the CD drive for a 2nd caddy, added a 5GHz wi-fi card, and still have the possibility to upgrade to a IPS Panel, backlight keyboard and other gimmicks. All with a phillips screwdriver, and official lenovo guide and my thumbs. And don't make me start talking about linux support, it's basically MacOS plug and play (in Windows you have to install a Lenovo App for the drivers). With all the upgrades I guess you can make the case, that will all that money, I could buy a better laptop. But I don't know, there is something charming about using the same machine for a long time, and have little improvements over time, with little to no downtime and re-learning workflows. Makes me sad, that when the time comes to replace the machine, I will not be able to repair it or upgrade as much.
• msravi 8y ago
  I've been using a mid-2010 Mac book Pro as my main laptop. Since 2010, the changes I've made are to bump up the RAM from 4GB to 8GB (its max), and replace the power brick. The battery now only lasts for about half an hour, so that needs replacement as well. There are also some big bad black dead spots on the display. In terms of speed and performance, I can't complain too much, at least for my use. I think we've hit a point where peripherals and batteries wear out sooner than the performance slowdown hits us.
• gwbas1c 8y ago
  I got rid of my 2006 MacBook pro Core 2 Duo in late 2012 because Apple was dropping support for it in future MacOS versions. I kept my replacement longer with much less issues.
• nunez 8y ago
  funny thing. i downgraded to an iphone se this past weekend to remedy the fatigue of carrying the large-in-comparison iPhone XS. It is not only perfectly functional for my daily needs, but it is also easier to use thanks to TouchID!
• davewasthere 8y ago
  My 8 year old Samsung Series 9 Ultraportable. I still far prefer it to my much newer ASUS. Best laptop I've ever owned. (essentially a macbook pro spec machine... and beautifully designed) It'd be my regular travel lappy if I could bother getting a new battery for it. Still great to code on, and the screen is far far better than the ASUS. Lighter too. (although no discrete graphics) But battery life is a killer. ASUS lasts up to ten hours, and the Samsung barely does 2 hours now. With a power point, that's not an issue, but it's nice to have something with a bit more go.
• murraybhenson 8y ago
  I have my parents (in their early 70's) using a 2008 MBP 15". Mostly for importing and organizing photos, email, and a bit of web stuff. They upgraded it to El Capitan - the latest MacOS it would take - without any difficulties. They'll likely use it for another couple of years until I donate my 2015 13" MBP to them.
• vlg 8y ago
  Gotta love my 2.5kg W520. Once I get the spare dosh to replace the ram and maybe HD, it'll be good for another 4 years, and I got it secondhand in pristine condition. My old X60, which was second hand, got used 3-4 years, and got resold, yet again! These machines aren't beasts, they're leviathans before which apples cower to their core, shedding their to-some-shiny, -seductive red skin.