121–130 of 295 posts
/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)
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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.
It showed it's age and lagged a lot with more intensive software like Fusion 360, but overall was a pretty good machine for 10 years.
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 am thinking of finally upgrading to an X280 or an X1 but I am afraid the keyboard will be too much of a downgrade.
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 wonder how a $150 chromebook would compare. $150 is in the territory of "Drive to store and buy in an emergency".
I wouldn't run Xcode on a non-SSD MBP, though.
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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.
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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 :(
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
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…
In the first category you'd have trouble finding a modern linux kernel for 32-bit, and distro, that is actually "i386". Since most things long ago dropped support for CPUs that don't have the i586 extensions and things like MMX/SSE. The 32-bit kernels you can get now, as far as I know, require at least a P166MMX or better to function properly.
In the second category, you need something with enough CPU and RAM resources to run a barebones xorg + openbox desktop environment, or xfce, or lxde, or similar. And then the ability to run a browser and terminal applications.
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