Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like it too, the screen is poor though
Poor how? I have a nice IPS in x220 and it looks amazing!
I have an IPS in an X230 and it Ghosts really bad.
Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)
131–140 of 295 posts
Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)
#132An 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
2006 would still be very usable and wouldn't require any special desktop or distribution. I think that as you go back further it will be web browsers that cause pain before Linux itself does.
Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)
#133For 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.
> And you'd be able to run up to 10.11 (El Capitan) on the Pro or 10.7 (Lion) on the MacBook.
or switch to any current linux, if you can figure out the 32bit efi booting
Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)
#1342011 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.
Up until last month I used a MBP from early 2011 daily. I did get (over time) 16 GB ram, an SSD, new battery, GPU replace (by Apple for free due to an issue) and a new charger. Lost month it really died though, no idea what it is (not the ssd, not the ram).
I'm still rocking a 2008 Lenovo X200. It's just fine for home use but it's pretty hot, slow (the blame is split between the slow CPU and the slow HDD) and noisy. Also at this age the battery is mostly good for power spikes and the screen is in permanent "night shift mode" (backlight is yellowish). Still chugs along.
Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)
#135As I mentioned in a previous thread [0], I upgraded an old X61 with a custom mainboard produced by a group of enthusiasts in China 1.5 years ago and never looked back. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18273305
I'm the author of this blog post. Soon after I wrote it, I got an X62 and did the daylight LED mod on it: https://geoff.greer.fm/2017/07/16/thinkpad-x62/
Damn the bezel around the keyboard is so sexy on that machine. That's exactly what I would want but no one sells something like that off the shelf with a warranty. I still rock my X230 but the display is garbage.
Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)
#1362011 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.
T420 here for the nostalgia. Apart from the ssd and ram upgrades, the FHD IPS upgrade made it an excellent cheaper alternative to the thinkpad 25th anniversary edition. My only problem with it is the battery, I bought a new one but it only lasts for about 2-3 hours.
If anyone here is planning to do the FHD upgrade, be very careful with power, you need to remove the battery/power cable and press the power button a couple of times to discharge all capacitors etc, otherwise you will blow a microscopic fuse (I did!) and it's near impossible to replace it. I just soldered a bridge between the contacts! I just can't do anything wrong again or I'll fry something.
Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)
#137> Either laptop improvements are well into diminishing returns, or progress in hardware has stagnated, or both. Sort of. The part about diminishing returns is arguably true, but hardware didn't stagnated. What happened is that _software_ stopped bloating and inflating like a balloon, as was the norm through the '80s, '90s and early '00s. When a Microsoft OS requires _less_ resources than it's predecessors (like early…
> What happened is that _software_ stopped bloating and inflating like a balloon, as was the norm through the '80s, '90s and early '00s.
And then Electron came out and... well, there went that dream.
Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)
#138I don't really understand how we've all been shocked by this. From https://www.maketecheasier.com/why-cpu-clock-speed-isnt-incr...:
> "Thanks to the limitations of physics and the current transistor material designs, increasing clock speed is not currently the best way to increase computational power."
In around 2006, the CPU industry became a commodity industry & innovation has since come in the form of Instruction Level Parallelism (ILP) rather than the engineering of faster CPUs. That shift is responsible for your 10+ year old laptop still being viable.
Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)
#1392011 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.
Same. I love it. The things I replaced in the 8 years I've had this machine: Stock HDD -> Samsung 840 SSD, Keyboard (failed within 3yr warranty, they shipped me a new one overnight), and the trackpoint cover. Oh, and the OS, from Windows 7 Pro to XUbuntu. I would love a higher density display but that's about it. I am thinking of finally upgrading to an X280 or an X1 but I am afraid the keyboard will be too much of a…
I bought the X1 Carbon Extreme. The classic 7 row keyboard layout is great, but the latest keyboard isn't as bad as I thought. The keys are fine, and I adapted to the layout: delete/home/end are independent from the f keys and easy to reach, page up/down are better than the old previous/next page keys in the classic layout.
Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)
#140A 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 think this could be defined into two categories, things with CLI only, and things that can run a reasonably modern GUI. 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…
OpenBSD i386 supports "all CPUs compatible with the Intel 80486 or better, with Intel-compatible hardware floating point"
https://www.openbsd.org/i386.html
NetBSD i386 says "Any i486 or better CPU should work - genuine Intel or a compatible such as Cyrix, AMD, or NexGen."