Oldest Viable Laptop (2017) • Hacker News Board

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#111

Post by danans » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 6:12 PM UTC

A related question that is also interesting:

What is the oldest laptop that can run an up-to-date, internet connected OS (i.e a museum device with the same OS from 1991 doesn't count). It doesn't have to have a fancy desktop, but it does have to support connectivity to the internet, and run all the latest security patches and updates.

This is different than the article because optimizing productivity isn't an objective, just how long the device can be updated before it becomes impossible to do so anymore, analogous to vintage car maintenance.

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#112

Post by gshubert17 » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 6:12 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…

My 2009 iMac, though not a laptop, benefitted from a swap to an SSD from the HD. At the same time I added more ram to total 8 GB. It works very well for me.

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#113

Post by shereadsthenews » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 6:13 PM UTC

snazz wrote: post #70

mr_spothawk wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 accept…

The keyboard isn’t mechanical (in the same way that a Cherry MX switch would be) but they are absolutely wonderful for a laptop keyboard.

The enormous Esc key seals the deal.

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#114

Post by eschneider » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 6:13 PM UTC

I use that same Thinkpad X61s as my personal laptop. Got one used for $100 and added a big drive and it's good-to-go for linux work. The keyboard's great and I actually like the 4x3 display. Best thing, if anything happens to it, it's a _cheap_ laptop, so not so bad.

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#115

Post by danbolt » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 6:14 PM UTC

danans wrote: post #111

A related question that is also interesting: What is the oldest laptop that can run an up-to-date, internet connected OS (i.e a museum device with the same OS from 1991 doesn't count). It doesn't have to have a fancy desktop, but it does have to support connectivity to the internet, and run all the latest security patches and updates. This is different than the article because optimizing productivity isn't an objecti…

I'm no expert in the matter, but I'd imagine the Lubuntu team has a lot of insight into that[1].

[1] https://docs.lubuntu.net/lubuntu_installation_on_old_compute...

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#116

Post by neferbast » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 6:15 PM UTC

And here I am using a HP elitebook 8440w from 2010-2011 as my main computer here .__. Though laggy sometimes, I use it daily with an avd + vscode without many issues.

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#117

Post by keithpeter » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 6:15 PM UTC

nwallin wrote: post #76

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.

Yup, I have an X61s running Xubuntu 18.04 quite nicely. 2Gb and a cheap 64Gb SSD.

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#118

Post by tibbon » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 6:16 PM UTC

Simiarly, I still have a 2009 Macbook Pro laying around that I sometimes use and it's just fine. I mean, it's not fast but it's fine.

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#119

Post by Tepix » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 6:16 PM UTC

One killer feature that recently appeared in notebooks is a Thunderbolt 3 port for eGPUs. They have the potential to lengthen the lifetime of the notebook.

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#120

Post by shereadsthenews » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 6:16 PM UTC

danans wrote: post #111

A related question that is also interesting: What is the oldest laptop that can run an up-to-date, internet connected OS (i.e a museum device with the same OS from 1991 doesn't count). It doesn't have to have a fancy desktop, but it does have to support connectivity to the internet, and run all the latest security patches and updates. This is different than the article because optimizing productivity isn't an objecti…

I've got a 486-class machine with 32MB of RAM running an up-to-date unix as my firewall. It really depends on what you want the machine to do for graphics and javascript and whatnot.