Oldest Viable Laptop (2017) • Hacker News Board

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#41

Post by NikolaNovak » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 5:15 PM UTC

markvdb wrote: post #9

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.

T420s, same generation; I have 3 of them now, SSD + 16GB RAM + secondary large HDD: find it hard to get that combo/performance in a modern laptop, let alone the keyboard quality:)

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#42

Post by js2 » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 5:15 PM UTC

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/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.

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#43

Post by john61 » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 5:17 PM UTC

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.

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#44

Post by snazz » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 5:19 PM UTC

initself wrote: post #24

Anarch157a wrote: post #20

Earlier 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 T440? They had to revert it for the next generation (T450).

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#45

Post by barbecue_sauce » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 5:19 PM UTC

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.

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#46

Post by i_am_proteus » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 5:22 PM UTC

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #2

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.

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.

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#47

Post by moftz » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 5:22 PM UTC

fabioborellini wrote: post #23

ianwalter wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea same. The thinkpad I had from 2004 had a trackpad. Maybe the trackpad was optional?

At the time X61s was notably smaller and more expensive than its competitors and other models in the Thinkpad lineup. The "normal-sized" model T61 has both touchpad and Trackpoint, so leaving touchpad out may have something to do with the case dimensions. Maybe there were no space left for it or it would have been awkwardly positioned when using keyboard or Trackpoint, and on a more "special" model leaving it out has…

The lack of a trackpad has to deal with not compromising space for the keyboard.

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#48

Post by walrus01 » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 5:23 PM UTC

phamilton wrote: post #27

walrus01 wrote: post #3

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 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…

I wonder how a $150 chromebook would compare. $150 is in the territory of "Drive to store and buy in an emergency".

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.

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#49

Post by mst » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 5:23 PM UTC

sergiosgc wrote: post #37

initself wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And the designer was fired and got a new job at Apple.

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#50

Post by chx » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 5:23 PM UTC

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... 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... Your battery life won't be awesome, alas.