Oldest Viable Laptop (2017) • Hacker News Board

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#101

Post by wtallis » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 6:07 PM UTC

teekert wrote: post #80

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 thes…

> but I believe there are no PATA SSD drives

There are a few. They mostly use the same controller chips that CompactFlash cards use, and you may be better off getting a high-end CF card and an adapter. SATA to IDE bridge chips also exist, but I doubt you'll find an adapter packaged correctly for use in a notebook.

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#102

Post by danans » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 6:08 PM UTC

An related question that is also interesting:

What is the oldest laptop that you can install an run a recent open source OS on. It doesn't have to ha e a fancy desktop

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#103

Post by ableal » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 6:08 PM UTC

larrik wrote: post #7

I'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.

Are you counting trackballs as touchpads? E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_100

I always found the trackball more usable than the touchpad ...

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#104

Post by pjmlp » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 6:09 PM UTC

This laptop is an Asus dual core from 2009, initially released with Windows 7, currently running Windows 10, maxed out to 8GB and an 1 TB SSD.

Still quite fit to run VS, Eclipse, Android Studio.

Only issue that the fan has already seen better days.

No wonder that PC makers cannot sell enough machines nowadays to keep investors happy.

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#105

Post by CPLX » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 6:09 PM UTC

JonathonW wrote: post #100

wwweston wrote: post #88

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…

Recent-ish (10.7 and later) versions of macOS tend to fall apart under memory pressure with traditional hard disks-- more so than previous versions did or than Windows does on similar hardware. My hunch is that they changed something in their virtual memory subsystem to takes advantage of characteristics of SSDs that isn't quite so friendly when your drive has significant seek times. A consequence of this is that an…

Yup. I have an office full of Mac mini’s from the 2014 series. The real basic ones with a SSD swapped in are totally fast and viable machines for just about anyone that’s not doing video or data intensive stuff.

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#106

Post by seiferteric » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 6:11 PM UTC

PascLeRasc wrote: post #55

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.

Sure, for specific applications, almost any computer could still have a useful purpose (hence me reusing my T61 for a router) but we are talking about a daily driver here. In my case, browsing the web became noticeably slower, especially watching videos. I began to suspect my CPU/Intel GPU lacked native support for decoding some newer video formats, but I don't know for sure. This is where its age really began to show though.

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#107

Post by vikingcaffiene » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 6:11 PM UTC

Good ol' Thinkpads. I have a T410 running Linux that is honestly fine for most of the work that I do day to day. If the screen was better I honestly couldn't come up with many reasons to get anything else. The keyboard alone makes it worth it.

In light of apple becoming less and less of a viable option, I have been wondering if we are going to start seeing a wave of these older machines come back into play. There's already a pretty healthy mod market out there, maybe our needs are so niche that we need to build our setups out ourselves? These older Thinkpads are modular enough that it's certainly possible. The nerd in me is excited about the possibilities. The pragmatist is a wee bit terrified. :)

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#108

Post by keithpeter » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 6:11 PM UTC

floatboth wrote: post #85

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.

Getting around 7h to 8h off my X220 with a 'no-name' battery (the larger kind that sticks out at the back). Fine for the last couple of years.

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#109

Post by pjmlp » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 6:11 PM UTC

danans wrote: post #102

An related question that is also interesting: What is the oldest laptop that you can install an run a recent open source OS on. It doesn't have to ha e a fancy desktop

I think anything with a smartphone like specs would be able to handle something like PuppyLinux.

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#110

Post by hrkucuk » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 6:11 PM UTC

2010 thinkpad x201 user here. Archlinux + XFCE4 setup. Everything works pretty smooth. Sometimes i am using software like Blender3D that requires decent hardware. Everyting works fine as a hobbyist.

As long as it does not fall and break apart, it is gonna work forever. But hey, it is thinkpad so...