Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

A majority of the bottle necks I've encountered have been ram. Maybe battery life secondarily. This is from a performance perspective. For software development work flow. Not trying to run the entire environment on my laptop. Barring of course something like constant video encoding or high cpu usage. Past that we're seeing improvements in weight, and display.

I've used thinkpads for a while. Starting off with a T430. With a quad core, and 16gb of ram and three SSDs. The two pain points were the display and weight.

I upgraded to a T440s, which fixed the screen and weight. But the ram became a deficit (12GB max). I worked around this by RDPing into a dedicated server I colocated. This offered a beefier desktop on demand (32GB ram + hexa core). But this also faltered because of poor internet connection outside of my home generally. The thin client works very well, as long as you have good internet. But good internet is very difficult to find.

I upgraded to an A485, most recent ryzen. It clocked in around 1200 after upgrades. All my older thinkpads were around 200 total. It's not worth it.

It's not just the core components. The dock was an extra 200. I picked up older thinkpad docks and carried the same model for several generations. I got them used I think for under 50. I had one at every junction of my house. Dock to the media center, desk, bedroom, etc.

From what I've seen the next thinkpad line is going to be even less upgradeble. Which is a real shame. That feature really extended the life of any business model.

In fall of 2016 (the start of my senior year of university), I bought a Thinkpad X40 for $40. After putting a 32GB CompactFlash card in, installing Debian, and increasing the RAM to 1GB, I started using it as my primary computer. (I didn't have to do that, I had a perfectly-good Thinkpad T430, but I wanted to give the X40 a good try.)

(For the record, my X40 had an ultra-low voltage Pentium M Dothan running at 1.1 GHz.)

It worked great for me, and did everything I needed or wanted it to do. I actually didn't use my T430 at all that school year, because the X40 worked fine for everything I was doing.

Unsurprisingly, it was fine for doing assignments in Python and C. It wasn't perfect with DrRacket -- I had to close and reopen every half hour as memory usage increased -- but it worked, and then I realized I could just use `gracket` or `racket`. I did a bunch of PDF/image editing in GIMP to clean up the lousy scans one of my professors gave us every week to read from. I wrote papers and presentations in LibreOffice. I killed time on reddit. I taught myself how to do CAD in SolveSpace. Most impressively, I ran CompuCell (a voxel-based biochemsitry simulator) in a windows virtual machine, fully interactively and only slightly slower than my classmates' computers.

I loved that computer. The battery would easily through one 90-minute class, and I could stretch it through two if I knew I wouldn't have an outlet. The keyboard was perfectly sized for me, and very comfy to type on. The trackpoint worked and felt great. (People didn't ask to borrow the laptop, since it din't have a trackpad.) The display fitted a satisfactory amount of stuff on it. It had real USB ports on it, just as people started having laptops without any USB-A ports at all. Using a laptop that was just able to do everything I needed it to do, I felt a lot more like I was working with the laptop, rather than just on it. (Perhaps this is a similar feeling to what people get when driving Maxda Miatas or BMW M3s -- working with the machine to get the most out of it.) And, in my eyes, it looked great -- a platonic ideal of a laptop.

Unfortunately, the X40 has a fatal flaw -- the southbridge tends to die. When that happened, I spent another $30 on a new motherboard. That also died, right around the end of the school year, in late spring of 2017. I decided I didn't want to to through that again, and I gave away the husk of my favorite computer ever -- my own "oldest viable laptop".

I do my gaming on a Desktop from 2011. It's a Core i5 with 12 GB of Ram (one bay is dead) and a Nvidia GTX 960 card.

I'm running Linux and Proton/Steamplay, and play a few AAA games from 2016. I'm not really confident that my framerate would improve much if I bought a new PC.

I had to look that up. Looks great, but screen is a little smaller than I hoped. https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?item=9SIA5WM5R10...

Yup, I had an official replacement about 5 years in, then a few years after that the replacement died and I paid for another replacement (long story).

Now I'm just waiting for this newest one to kick the bucket. There are already some stability issues. Once it goes, I'm going to try fixing the thermal paste myself (https://www.ifixit.com/Story/20939/MBP_2011_GPU_Nightmare). I have all the parts and tools in my desk drawer ready to go for when it's game time.

I don't really know what I'll do if that doesn't work. I've considered getting a refurbished 2015 MBP.