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Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

geoff.greer.fm

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Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#71

Post by EamonnMR »

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…

I've got an X220 and it's fast enough for everything but gaming (which is to say I can run UDK and Godot on it, but the HDD is too small to justify installing any AAA titles), and rugged/cheap enough that I don't feel too bad putting it through the wringer. Old fleet machine, picked it up refurbished.

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#72

Post by 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.

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#73

Post by magicnmonkey »

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…

IBM thinkpad looks like a laptop which mechanics or blue collar laborers would use.

It makes no sense to use them for highly intellectual tasks like programming.

For this you need Chromebook or MacBook to look hip and Wiz.

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#76

Post by nwallin »

freedomben wrote: post #66

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.

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.

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#77

Post by Anarch157a »

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.

There were a couple of those in my last job. But apparently they reverted to having proper buttons.

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#78

Post by howard941 »

freedomben wrote: post #54
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?

No it's a great question. I'm otherwise comfortable where I'm at, the benefits are excellent, but mostly because I don't want to relocate.

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#79

Post by aurelian15 »

slothtrop wrote: post #35

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

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.

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#80

Post by 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...

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