
Oldest Viable Laptop (2017) - febeling
https://geoff.greer.fm/2017/01/23/oldest-viable-laptop/
======
markvdb
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.

~~~
htk
T420 here for the nostalgia. Apart from the ssd and ram upgrades, the FHD IPS
upgrade made it an excellent cheaper alternative to the thinkpad 25th
anniversary edition. My only problem with it is the battery, I bought a new
one but it only lasts for about 2-3 hours.

If anyone here is planning to do the FHD upgrade, be very careful with power,
you need to remove the battery/power cable and press the power button a couple
of times to discharge all capacitors etc, otherwise you will blow a
microscopic fuse (I did!) and it's near impossible to replace it. I just
soldered a bridge between the contacts! I just can't do anything wrong again
or I'll fry something.

~~~
jplayer01
Huh, odd. Even my old, quite run-down battery (9-cell) gets me 5-6 hours. Back
when it was brand new, it got me anywhere between 7-10 hours. This is on
Linux. Maybe it's the display, since I still only have the old 1600x panel.

~~~
5166cc9c39fa61
> Maybe it's the display, since I still only have the old 1600x panel.

It is most likely due to poor quality batteries. The "cells" in a 9-cell
battery are 18650 batteries, which vary in capacity from 3400mAh at the high
end, to counterfeit ones that are labelled to have 1200mAh capacity, but in
reality have only a fraction of that. Lithium-ion batteries also have a
limited shelf life, so even good quality aftermarket batteries will have a
fraction of the rated capacity if they have been sitting in a warehouse for
years.

------
alkonaut
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.

~~~
0815test
> ...Old laptops without [RAM+SSD] upgrades aren’t really viable these days
> unless you work all day in a terminal.

Huh, I don't think this is correct. A lightweight Linux distribution such as
Debian can make very good use of even a spinning-rust HDD, as long as it has
enough available RAM that it's not hitting disk all the time. As I've
mentioned in a different comment, even 512MB RAM can be more than enough _if_
you have no need for a web browser.

~~~
dingaling
I have some Dell D430 ultralights that max out at 2GB. Usually once a day the
OOM Killer slaughters the file manager or GIMP or sometimes X itself. It
really is too chancy now for serious use, I'd suggest 4GB minimum.

~~~
0815test
Sounds like a software problem to me. Put Debian on them with a Xfce/LXDE/i3wm
session, and 2GB should be more than enough. 4GB is outright plentiful.

------
rotrux
I don't really understand how we've all been shocked by this. From
[https://www.maketecheasier.com/why-cpu-clock-speed-isnt-
incr...](https://www.maketecheasier.com/why-cpu-clock-speed-isnt-increasing/):

> "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
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
> "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.

------
wwweston
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.

~~~
JonathonW
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.

~~~
gshubert17
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.

~~~
sprocket
That's also my experience with a 2009 MBP. Swapped out the HD for an SSD,
maxed the RAM, and put in a new battery, and had an adequate machine for most
daily tasks.

It showed it's age and lagged a lot with more intensive software like Fusion
360, but overall was a pretty good machine for 10 years.

------
ozzyman700
/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)

~~~
akhilcacharya
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
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.

------
howard941
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
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
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
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
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.

------
teekert
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-
Satelli...](http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/23468/Toshiba-Satellite-
Pro-420-CDS-810/)

~~~
listenallyall
+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.

------
Anarch157a
> 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
> 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
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
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!

------
cr0sh
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
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
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
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.

~~~
wlesieutre
I actually like the "put a case on it" approach for robustness. It lets the
devices be smaller, while leaving the degree of protection and bulkiness up to
individual users. Case in point, I have a very slim case on my iPhone SE and
tend not to drop it, but a lot of people I know with larger phones put the
2-layer rubber + plastic Otter style cases on them because they get dropped a
lot. Others have smaller or no cases, but use pop-sockets and finger loops
stuck on the back to make them grippable.

On the iPad side of things you have options like the Rugged Book Go from Zagg:
[https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/01/07/ipad-ipad-pro-
get...](https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/01/07/ipad-ipad-pro-get-new-
cases-from-zagg-with-rugged-book-go-slim-book-go-messenger-folio)

Apple's phones have turned into absurdly priced luxury items, but the $800
starting price for an 11" iPad Pro feels pretty reasonable for what it is.

EDIT - admittedly the hardware is overkill for running terminal sessions,
something more like a Chromebook would be a cheaper fit if the battery life
and screen were of similar quality

------
walrus01
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
I wonder how a $150 chromebook would compare.

$150 is in the territory of "Drive to store and buy in an emergency".

~~~
walrus01
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.

------
js2
For reference, a 2007 era Apple laptop would be one of these:

\-
[https://everymac.com/systems/apple/macbook_pro/specs/macbook...](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/specs/macbook-
cor...](https://everymac.com/systems/apple/macbook/specs/macbook-
core-2-duo-2.16-white-13-mid-2007-specs.html)

And you'd be able to run up to 10.11 (El Capitan) on the Pro or 10.7 (Lion) on
the MacBook.

~~~
0utbreak
You can hackintosh some old Macs to run Mojave using
[http://dosdude1.com/mojave/](http://dosdude1.com/mojave/)

~~~
saagarjha
This isn't really a Hackintosh, since you're running the OS on genuine Apple
hardware.

------
JohnJamesRambo
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.

~~~
i_am_proteus
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.

------
chx
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...](https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-
Core-i5-2520M-vs-Intel-Core-i5-7200U/m29vsm153577) 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...](https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-
Core-i7-3520M-vs-Intel-Core-i7-7500U/m50vsm171274) Your battery life won't be
awesome, alas.

~~~
i_am_proteus
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.

~~~
bluedino
They're much faster. 50-60% on the single core stuff and 300% faster on multi-
core tests.

Not to mention they cruise along on things that use the newer extensions for
things like video playback, plus the integrated graphics hardware is much much
faster

~~~
chx
> They're much faster. 50-60% on the single core stuff and 300% faster on
> multi-core tests.

[citation needed] 50-60% is absurdly large for single core, the reality is
20%, and 300% is crazy. The T480 uses a 15W quad core on the same 14nm process
as the 15W chip in the T470 and because it's slightly more power efficient
there's a little gain, about 25-30%. So the difference between the Sandy
Bridge T420 to Kaby Lake Refresh T480 is perhaps 50% in multi core.

Here's my favorite Sandy Bridge to Kaby Lake IPC benchmark collection:
[https://www.hardocp.com/article/2017/01/13/kaby_lake_7700k_v...](https://www.hardocp.com/article/2017/01/13/kaby_lake_7700k_vs_sandy_bridge_2600k_ipc_review/4)

~~~
bluedino
I'm just going on Cinebench scores I've done on my own machines.

    
    
        T480S i5 141
        T460S i5 105
        X220  i5 100
    

Not much of a jump in the _4 generations_ from the X220 to the T460S but quite
a jump going to the T480S.

Double the score of the X220 and quadruple the score of the T480 and you're
going to end up about 575 to 205 for multicore, which is almost 3X as fast.

This doesn't even bring GPU or SSD performance into the picture. Just raw CPU.

I love my X220 but Windows 10 will regularly bring it to it's knees, even with
an SSD and 8GB of RAM. And that's not even doing anything, I'm not sure if
it's updating or what. Not to mention it's not exactly a thin machine, the
1366x768 screen is mediocre...The 1080/2K IPS screens coming to the Thinkpad
line finally made them usable, IMO. Even the old IPS screens in the X220
tablets were still dim, low-resolution, etc.

~~~
chx
Isn't Cinebench multicore? This is in line with what I would expect for
multicore results...

~~~
bluedino
You can run it either way. Those are single-core results

------
freedomben
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
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
Yup, I have an X61s running Xubuntu 18.04 quite nicely. 2Gb and a cheap 64Gb
SSD.

~~~
freedomben
oh haha, I stand corrected, thanks.

------
shereadsthenews
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
I used a 12" PowerBook G4 daily up until a couple of years ago.

------
lqet
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
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
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.

------
danans
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.

~~~
shereadsthenews
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
Which unix?

~~~
shereadsthenews
It evolved from a stripped down Debian originally to Core Linux today. It's
just a firewall, so it hardly needs any software.

~~~
LeoPanthera
Whether Linux is "a unix" I suppose would be a big debate. :)

------
soulnothing
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.

------
seiferteric
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
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
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.

------
qrbLPHiKpiux
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.

------
kakwa_
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.

------
0utbreak
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.

------
hrkucuk
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...

------
phamilton
Battery life is necessary to do my job, and is pretty much the only reason I
get new hardware now.

~~~
Theodores
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.

------
EvanAnderson
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.)

------
dsfyu404ed
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
Welcome to my world.

------
initself
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.

~~~
5166cc9c39fa61
> 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.

------
grawprog
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.

------
nonamenoslogan
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.

------
larrik
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
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
The TrackPoint is the Vim of pointing devices. Need a couple thousand hours to
get proficient and then everything else is inferior.

~~~
xxpor
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
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.

------
thorwasdfasdf
With meaningful innovation slowing down, I expect older laptops will become
increasingly viable.

~~~
lostlogin
As long as vendors don’t put crappy parts in them - keyboards being the
obvious one currently.

------
javchz
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.

------
rudolph9
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.

~~~
rb808
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=9SIA5WM5R10...](https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?item=9SIA5WM5R10355)

------
jasonvorhe
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
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.

------
pjmlp
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
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?

------
everdrive
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.

------
vikingcaffiene
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.
:)

------
batbomb
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.

------
Deinos
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.

------
salex89
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.

~~~
floatboth
> 60-90 minutes

That's really, really low for a *40. Unless you mean like 90 minutes of full
CPU usage.

~~~
salex89
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.

------
jadbox
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)

------
amanaplanacanal
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.

------
davewasthere
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.

------
msravi
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.

------
Causality1
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.

------
neferbast
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.

------
vlg
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.

------
HumanDrivenDev
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.

------
bandrade
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.

------
syntaxing
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.

------
bmaupin
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)

------
anonu
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
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
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.

------
murraybhenson
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.

------
fixvzbdjzis
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
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
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

------
distant_hat
I have a ~2003 iBook still going strong.

------
eschneider
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.

------
pier25
> 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.

------
tzhenghao
+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.

------
zwieback
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.

------
kemitchell
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.

------
slezyr
> 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).

~~~
linguae
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.

------
konamicode
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.

------
meuk
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
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=N82E1683411...](https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834114635)

------
bitwize
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.

------
samirm
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.

------
gwbas1c
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.

------
ChuckMcM
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.

------
Tepix
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.

------
tibbon
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.

------
danans
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

~~~
jdboyd
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.

------
barbecue_sauce
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.

------
holri
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.

------
isostatic
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

------
dfox
As far as I have anything that could be called daily work laptop it is
ThinkPad X200s with maxed-out RAM and cheap SSD.

------
slothtrop
2010 Dell latitude. Runs just as well as it did when I first got it. Mind you
it looks rough around the edges.

~~~
aurelian15
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.

------
nunez
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!

------
bfrog
X220 still is my small collection of computers, could easily use it daily
still

------
rjsw
I still use an ASUS A6000 from 2006.

------
abujazar
Hey, did anyone hear about Spectre?

