Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like it too, the screen is poor though
Poor how? I have a nice IPS in x220 and it looks amazing!
Too bright! Just not the old school matte thing somehow.
Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)
31–40 of 295 posts
Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)
#32Middle 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.
Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)
#33I'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.
I've used (and owned, although I bought it when it was well past obsolete) laptops without any pointing devices. Early on, trackballs were common. I personally think the ergonomics of the keyboard at the edge of the computer with a trackball hanging off the side are way better than the huge reach we have to make over a modern trackpad (or even the sizable reach on the ThinkPads in this thread). But I don't have the patience to build a frankenlaptop with an older shell and something reasonably modern inside.
Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)
#34Last 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.
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.
Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)
#352010 Dell latitude. Runs just as well as it did when I first got it. Mind you it looks rough around the edges.
Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)
#36I'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.
My x200 doesn't have a trackpad but the next model came with one. The space available for a trackpad is not much so I'm guessing they ditched the trackpad so that they didn't have to sacrifice keyboard real estate.
The keyboard on an x200 is one of the nicest I've ever used for a laptop of that size (12.1" display). It covers as much horizontal space as possible so you get keys that not only have a proper amount of area to not hit two keys at once but have a proper aspect ratio.
The laptop comes with a trackpoint instead which after dailying that x200 for most of my school career, I've come to love and use it on any laptop I come across.
Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
There's no such thing as a Thinkpad without a Trackpoint and proper buttons.
The second or third gen X1Carbon used a clickpad. And an LCD bar for the F1-F12 keys. The two design decisions were reversed in the next iteration of the laptop.
Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)
#38As 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.
Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)
#39With meaningful innovation slowing down, I expect older laptops will become increasingly viable.
Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)
#402011 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.
I like it too, the screen is poor though
There's a project to upgrade the X220 to a 1920x1080 panel:
https://old.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/6wnmqd/x220x230_f...