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Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

geoff.greer.fm

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Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#81

Post by tokai »

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 remember Lenovos marketing for the new keyboards. They were branded as a significant improvement for typing over the old ones. Bizarre.

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#82

Post by 0utbreak »

js2 wrote: post #42

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.

You can hackintosh some old Macs to run Mojave using http://dosdude1.com/mojave/

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#83

Post by floatboth »

alkonaut wrote: post #63

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.

ehh, 10 year old CPUs kinda suck. I upgraded from a 2010 MBA to a Thinkpad X240 in 2015, and it's been much better.

The Penryn Core 2 Duo made the Macbook warm and noisy (the joke was that it's called Air because the fans push a lot of air all the time), while the Haswell-ULT chip literally pulls ~1W for the whole package at idle, and the fan often just stays off, and even when it's on it's very quiet.

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#85

Post by floatboth »

salex89 wrote: post #61

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 b…

> 60-90 minutes

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

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#86

Post by 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.

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#87

Post by floatboth »

tokai wrote: post #84
mbrumlow wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Poor how? I have a nice IPS in x220 and it looks amazing!

16:9 for a work machine is a bad choice, and the resolution is horrible.

Unfortunately most things are 16:9. Some MacBooks are 16:10, and Surfaces are 3:2 which is really cool, but 16:9 still dominates :(

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#88

Post by 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.

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#89

Post by 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.

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