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I went back to using a ThinkPad from 2012

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Re: I went back to using a ThinkPad from 2012

#261

I like to buy ex-corporate ~5 year old Thinkpads, get from a seller who gives atleast 6 months warranty, put new batteries in and they are usually far better in every way than anything new for the same price. Am currently very happy with my T460S, runs Linux or Win10 great. My previous machines that the kids use for school work and Roblox are x250 and x220, and previous to that I have an X200 and a T61, that all last…

> I like to buy ex-corporate ~5 year old Thinkpads, get from a seller who gives atleast 6 months warranty I am curious if this a US thing only. I mean, I've heard of company vehicles in second hand market but never company laptops. In my experience all these company laptops get decommisioned by IT never to remove any data, but I never really considered what happens at End-of-life for those. A few questions: 1. Where…

I am in the UK. I buy from eBay, there are a number of big sellers to choose from. I tend to get my batteries from Amazon, I've probably bought 6 generic unbranded for my thinpads over the years, generally they seem to be about 90% capacity of genuine, but low prices mean great value. One I bought in 2020 was faulty on arrival, rest have all been good.

Re: I went back to using a ThinkPad from 2012

#262
> I’d like to thank Intel here for making this possible. The CPU innovation stagnation between 2012-2017 has resulted in 4 cores still being an acceptable low-end CPU in early 2022. Without this, my laptop would likely be obsolete by now.

Hahaha, this last sentence seals the overall tone of the article.

Re: I went back to using a ThinkPad from 2012

#263
post #146

I find it funny how people seem to fixate so much on the fact that the author upgraded various components to say the title is misleading. As someone with apparently similar requirements, the take-away from this should be this: Even though significant work is required to keep these old machines working, some people prefer to do so. Crucially, they prefer it not because they love tinkering, but simply because the value…

> the value propositions of 2021/2022 hardware doesn't look better I'm glad you managed to distill my feelings so clearly. Most new things are just gimmicks, it's pretty rare that good innovations come into the laptop area. Think of stuff like non-16:9 displays: older thinkpads had beautiful displays that were amazing for doing actual work. Now we're seeing 16:10 displays coming back, and it's awesome. The ThinkPad T…

And newer laptops are all so damned huge, and they have terrible keyboards and trackpads with no buttons that are offset to one side.

My favorite laptop currently is an HP EliteBook 2760p that I got for free from a friend who works at a company that was throwing it away. Aside from the battery being dead, it's the best laptop I've ever used.

Re: I went back to using a ThinkPad from 2012

#264
I did something similar by switching back to my old Lenovo after a poor experience with a HP computer. I tell here my story for those interested in cases like the one described in the article.

Three years ago, I was feeling that my Lenovo Thinkpad Edge 540 (2014) was a bit outdated, and since I just won a grant and had some money for this, I looked for a new laptop. At the time, my employer encouraged all the staff to buy laptops from HP; the discount was not significant, but for those that accepted to follow that route, the amount of bureaucracy was significantly less (I work in a public university in Italy, and the bureaucracy for even the simplest tasks can be daunting!). The model I chose was a HP ProBook G450, and I bought an extended warranty too.

After less than one year, one of the small plastic clips holding each key in place on the keyboard got loose, and after having put it again in place a few times, after a couple of weeks broke. I contacted the assistance, asking for a replacement of the pin. Well, they told me that my extended warranty did not cover «external peripherals» like the keyboard (wtf, is the keyboard in a laptop an external perhiperal?!). The person at the phone was clearly embarassed in telling me that HP's policy prevented them from sending these paper clips by email, and he instead told me that the only solution was to substitute the whole keyboard for ~340€. Obviously I refused. I started looking for replacement pins on eBay (which were sold for I decided to buy a replacement keyboard on eBay, after I quickly checked on YouTube that there were videos showing how to make the replacement step by step. Once I got the keyboard by email, I started tearing apart the laptop as described in these videos, but at the end I found that some glue was keeping the keyboard attached to the frame, and that I should have used some solvent to remove it and then glue it again. (It would have been better for me to view the video in its entirety before ordering the replacement!)

I was scared by the idea of doing this kind of work, as I never did something similar before, so I decided that I would have instead removed the pins from the new keyboard and used them in the laptop. I put together every piece of the laptop again, but I probably broke some wire or misplaced some component, because once assembled the computer refused to start! Out of frustration, instead of debugging the problem, I took my old Lenovo Thinkpad out of the shelf and upgraded its OS, putting the two-year-old HP back in a drawer.

It has been my workhorse again since six months, and despite not being as performant as the other one, at least it works! In particular, now I am really appreciating the sturdy keyboard, which is still working fine after 8 years. To think that I disliked it when I typed on it for the first time!

Re: I went back to using a ThinkPad from 2012

#265
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For one thing (for me, at least): The keyboard. I have yet to see a good keyboard on a modern laptop, and I use a lot of different ones. Some people do not care, but I do. There's some keyboards that are "still decent", but all of them are progressively getting worse. Well, they say that Mac keyboards are getting better again, but I don't like their zero-keytravel style in the first place, not even in the ones that w…

> The keyboard But what about the keyboard /layout/? My rant at [0] To clarify it somewhat, currently I have a laptop with two Fn keys. I rarely use the right one, but it feels very organic when I do. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29807256

I know this was a big issue for Thinkpads throughout the years, but as much as I care about the feel of a keyboard, I have never cared about the layout.

I guess we all have our pet peeves.

Re: I went back to using a ThinkPad from 2012

#266
This article makes me more glad than ever that I saved all my old Stinkpads (a name I use cynically, yet affectionately). They're the only brand of laptop I've used since when they were made by IBM. I have 8 or so now. None of them quit working -- all replaced just because I wanted a newer model. Reliability and Linux readiness has never really been an issue (except the normal Nvidia driver issues). These, along with a stash of IBM M-101 keyboards keeps my ergonomics consistent since the 90s.

Re: I went back to using a ThinkPad from 2012

#267
post #197

The T430 was the machine that hooked me on to ThinkPads almost 20 years ago. Having tried many newer models since then, including the X1 Extreme I use for work nowadays, I agree that they just don't make them as they used to. Ever since the Lenovo acquisition in particular, quality has gone down substantially, to the point where they don't feel special at all, and are on par with other Chinese mass produced brands. F…

> The T430 was the machine that hooked me on to ThinkPads almost 20 years ago.

Ah, I misremembered... It was actually the T42. The T430 was still a pretty good machine.

Re: I went back to using a ThinkPad from 2012

#268
post #198
post #192

Laptops in the early 2010s kind of reached a level of being adequate enough for most use-cases that it's hard to really justify an upgrade. I feel, as I write this on my late 2013 MacBook Pro, that it's powerful enough for most normal activities, read, browse, video calls, work on not too large data sets, etc. Anything that needs to run longer than I keep the laptop open can run on a different device, many programs a…

To me VDI is the way to go. I want my development machine to be in the cloud and always running. I want a lightweight notebook that only takes into consideration screen, keyboard and battery that I can connect to my virtual desktop from anywhere. I want a dedicated desk at home with a $40 PCoIP thin client purchased used on EBay hooked up to my multiple monitors that connects to the same virtual desktop. With this yo…

My employer makes us do this and I absolutely hate it. It slows me down so much. I now have to effectively maintain two machines that cause issues at twice the frequency. The server isn't even notably faster than my MacBook. Moreover, in my experience, the uniformity of these cloud development machines also encourages developers to get lazy and start making all sorts of assumptions about the environment the application runs in. This makes it impossible over time to run the application locally and will cause issues during the inevitable hardware upgrades in the future.

Re: I went back to using a ThinkPad from 2012

#269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see you also follow my rule: When buying a laptop, always buy top spec. My laptop is an OG X1 Carbon i7/8/256. I can't upgrade it easily, but I'm actually happy with it for my purposes. My main driver is a Ryzen desktop though, that's a proper beast.

> I see you also follow my rule: When buying a laptop, always buy top spec. ive become a believer for both desktops and laptops. the ratio of hardware performance to software performance requirements increases over time, but its linear and the slope is small. knowing that, you can buy cheap machines frequently or expensive machines infrequently and hit a similar $/time expenditure - but one way you get fast puterz an…

It really depends on what you’re doing. When the cheap machine still lasts 5+ years the value proposition of going expensive just isn’t there.

IMO, the reason to buy a more expensive machine is simply the benefit of using a faster machine for several years. If you’re spending 20 hours a week on a PC then it’s worth stretching the budget a little. However, that generally only applies to one or two form factors not everything phone, tablet, desktop, and laptop. If the only thing you use the tablet for is Netflix in bed then a cheap one is probably fine.

Re: I went back to using a ThinkPad from 2012

#270
post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the 3090 scores twice what the M1 GPU does It helps that you can buy a maxed out macbook pro for the price of a single 3090 though.

A 3090 is $2300 right now, even paying the scalper tax. How much M1 MacBook Pro is that getting you? That said, I do wish the M1 GPU could game; my downtime hobby is the only thing stopping me from buying one.

>A 3090 is $2300 right now, even paying the scalper tax.

Where can you find that? lowest I can find is 2800 new. There are some pre-owned for 2700 and some open auctions at roughly 2300 but those will land substantially higher than 2300 I would imagine.

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