Oldest Viable Laptop (2017) • Hacker News Board

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#181

Post by tluyben2 » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 7:39 PM UTC

markvdb wrote: post #9

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.

Yep and great battery life and the battery is swappable. So I carry a spare 9 cell which, using ubuntu/i3wm, gives me close to 30 hours.

About dying suddenly; that goes, in my experience, far more for new hardware. Old hardware (especially if we are talking ‘ancient’ hardware like before 1995) has a lot more signs of giving up and a lot easier ways of fixing it when it does. I have machines that dies that first started smoking so you could pinpoint what component gave out. The x220 is not quite that old but because I have a stack of spares but one favorite, I have been able to fix it after it suddenly died quite easily without just replacing the entire thing. That will not happen when your 2018 mbp suddenly dies.

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#182

Post by mxfihdsgyxegaas » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 7:39 PM UTC

close04 wrote: post #134

teekert wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Am using the same.

I advise installing an SSD and thinkfan or TPFC. Mine is mostly silent (except when watching video)

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#183

Post by 0815test » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 7:40 PM UTC

cat199 wrote: post #133

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.

> 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

> if you can figure out the 32bit efi booting

Multiboot Debian ISO FTW, there. (And rEFInd 32-bit as a bootloader for the installed system.) This trick also helps deal with crappy low-end hardware that is 64-bit capable but ships with 32-bit UEFI and Win 8/10 installs. (They do this, or at least used to, because Win 8/10 in UEFI mode is restricted to running the same architecture that the UEFI is. A 32-bit UEFI only runs 32-bit Windows, and 64-bit UEFI only runs 64-bit Windows. Of course, Linux is not so restricted - and it certainly can boot from 32-bit UEFI and then switch cleanly to 64-bit operation!)

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#184

Post by robin_reala » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 7:42 PM UTC

floatboth wrote: post #87

tokai wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :(

All MacBooks apart from the old (and sadly missed) 11" are 16:10.

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#185

Post by ChuckMcM » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 7:44 PM UTC

Nothing quite illustrates the death of Moore’s law quite like this does. I brought out an old thinkpad for a similar reason and was able to do everything I needed to do.

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#186

Post by bmaupin » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 7:44 PM UTC

I've kept a 2008 MBP running by upgrading the RAM and putting in an SSD. But I'd never buy another one since (at least according to Apple's website [1]) the last upgradable model was released in 2012.

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201165

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#187

Post by robin_reala » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 7:47 PM UTC

alkonaut wrote: post #97

floatboth wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes the key is that at certain points in the past there is a nice jump in perf followed by a long plateau. One recent example is in high perf intel laptop CPUs. If you got an i7 laptop 4 years ago and and then again 1 year ago (an i7-7xxx), there was little difference. If you had waited just a little longer for the i7/i9 8xxx gen, it’s suddenly a huge jump. And one other (but not as extreme) example was the 2011 Sand…

Yep. I’ve got a mid-2012 Macbook Air as my personal machine. Was thinking about picking up a new 2018 one only to realise that the CPU had increased by 50% in that time. Substantial, sure, but not enough to bother spending another €1500. Cheaper to spend a few hours optimising the long-running scripts I was using at the time.

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#188

Post by dingaling » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 7:47 PM UTC

0815test wrote: post #155

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.

> ...Old laptops without [RAM+SSD] upgrades aren’t really viable these days unless you work all day in a terminal. Huh, I don't think this is correct. A lightweight Linux distribution such as Debian can make very good use of even a spinning-rust HDD, as long as it has enough available RAM that it's not hitting disk all the time. As I've mentioned in a different comment, even 512MB RAM can be more than enough _if_ you…

I have some Dell D430 ultralights that max out at 2GB. Usually once a day the OOM Killer slaughters the file manager or GIMP or sometimes X itself. It really is too chancy now for serious use, I'd suggest 4GB minimum.

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#189

Post by larrik » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 7:48 PM UTC

sverige wrote: post #8

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.

It has the TrackPoint, which is sort of a famous love/hate feature. (I love it.) The ThinkPad is my favorite all-time laptop design. No surprise to me that the author is still using it after getting his MacBook back from the shop.

Ah yes, the "randomly click on the screen while typing G or H" device. I always pulled that off mine. Didn't love that tapping it produced a mouseclick.

Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

#190

Post by tluyben2 » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 7:51 PM UTC

cr0sh wrote: post #141

I bet if somebody held a gun to my head, and I was at least allowed to dial in via modem to a *nix server with node.js on it - I could probably do my current job, to a certain bare-bones level... ...using my TRS-80 Model 100. Don't get me wrong - it would be a nightmare and no fun, and some things just wouldn't be possible. Though that's definitely not what the author had in mind...

Besides web browsing I could potentially do a lot of my work on an early 80s machine. Even a non connected one would mostly do fine. I would need two of them at least for coding (I had 2 of them in the 80s as well for coding; crashing is normal as there is no protection when you mess up, and booting is fast but still a hassle, so two or more machines with a monitor switch was the faster solution) but I would get quite far given a bit of patience. It is insane how slow these machines were compared to what we have now, but with some effort, people get to run stuff like Symbos[1] on them and for some jobs that works. Web browsing is just quite impossible: many html pages do not even fit in memory, let alone allowing rendering. Solutions are sticking a Pi in the cartridge port that sends lynx rendered pages for instance, but that is cheating. So then a modem to a linux machine would be the better option.

[1] http://www.symbos.de/