Oldest Viable Laptop (2017) • Hacker News Board

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#51

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

Anarch157a wrote: post #16

> 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…

> 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).

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#52

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

ozzyman700 wrote: post #4

/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)

For what's worth, I get <1GB mem usage with Cinnamon as well.

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#53

Post by ianwalter » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 5:26 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…

Ah yea, I did have a T series. Thanks for the info.

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#54

Post by freedomben » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 5:30 PM UTC

howard941 wrote: post #32

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 cou…

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?

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#55

Post by PascLeRasc » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 5:30 PM UTC

seiferteric wrote: post #14

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.

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.

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#56

Post by moftz » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 5:30 PM UTC

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 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.

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#57

Post by i_am_proteus » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 5:30 PM UTC

chx wrote: post #50

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 gr…

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.

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#58

Post by 0utbreak » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 5:30 PM UTC

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.

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#59

Post by mr_spothawk » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 5:31 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.

i don't like to rep the x220s much because i don't want their prices to go up in ebay/craigslist/etc...

but it would be nice if we had good aftermarket hardware support, so maybe this is a fine time to rep.

my x220 is a delightful experience. awesome mechanical keyboard and (with SSD & 16gb ram) pretty snappy on all the websites i need it for.

perfect for all kinds of non-javascript coding, and handles webpack acceptably well.

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#60

Post by EvanAnderson » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 5:32 PM UTC

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.)