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The laptop that won't die

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Re: The laptop that won't die

#161

Post by pbmonster »

baq wrote: post #100
thot_experiment wrote: post #99

I have a crazy idea that would vastly improve modern laptop design. You would build in some sort of a reversible conduit interrupt device (may be lost tech but I hear rumors that it's possible) that would allow the end user to disconnect the battery. This would solve the #1 problem with laptops which is that sometimes I need to use the laptop and it's out of battery because it decided to turn itself on in my bag.

That’s only started to happening in the last few years. Before 2015 laptops had good manners - when they were told to shut down, they kept being shut down.

I thought I was alone with that problem. Do you know what the culprit is? What keeps randomly waking up modern laptops?

It's so stupid, too. There is exactly one single case when I want my laptop to wake up with the lid closed: when I plug in the dock. Every single other case where it wakes up with the lid closed is a bug in my eyes.

Re: The laptop that won't die

#162

Post by Propelloni »

yCloser wrote: post #143

I see absolutely nothing special in a pc that lives 10 years. Most pc last that long. And my centrino-1 vaio laptop from 2004 is still alive

Agreed. My dad (74 now) uses an IBM Thinkpad T23 (2001, fully upgraded to 1Gb of RAM) running Linux with an old version of Rocrail to control his model railroad.

Re: The laptop that won't die

#163

Post by rollcat »

nirui wrote: post #104

This is another Thinkpad festival post? Let me just cold you down a bit by telling you that a 12-year-old laptop still kicking isn't that big of a deal. I have this DELL Studio laptop released back in September, 2009, and it can still kick very well too if I decide to recruit it back to my "workforce". I retired it just 3~4 years ago because I got a T480. Heck, some of my code (old versions) for the same project that…

> a 12-year-old laptop still kicking isn't that big of a deal.

I have a 20yro TiBook. Both the RTC and the main battery are dead, and there's a tiny screen defect, but the machine is otherwise perfectly usable (if relatively slow). And by usable, I mean the desktop experience of Mac OS X 10.5 often feels more polished than that of some of the modern OS's...

The big bummer is that the modern web keeps raising a wall that's getting too tall for these machines to climb. TLS, JavaScript, and the firehose of new standards are making a lot of resources inaccessible.

(If you're in charge of maintaining a web server, please consider allowing unencrypted traffic on port 80 (rather than unconditionally redirecting to HTTPS), unless the Upgrade-Insecure-Requests[1] is present. Coupled with HSTS[2], it allows these "living museum pieces" to stay alive, while not compromising on security.)

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Up...

[2]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/St...

Re: The laptop that won't die

#164

Post by jlokier »

I'm using a Macbook Pro retina from late 2013 as my daily driver, for work as a software developer and other things. It recently passed 10 years, being used every day including weekends.

It's been great. I bought it when two non-Apple laptops failed on me within weeks of each other. A Fujitsu-Siemens which was also great until then, and a Compaq.

I'd been avoiding Apple for years in line with the GNU project's stance, but after a big life event I decided to try it out. I transferred over my Linux installation from the previous laptops to a VM on the Mac, so I can four-finger-swipe between the two OSes as if they are running side by side.

The Mac's 16GB RAM is bit tight these days but that's mostly due to memory used by Firefox with my many tabs. The 512GB SSD has been annoying for a long time as I filled it up fairly quickly, and rarely find the time to clean things up. When I bought it, I thought I'd be able to upgrade the SSD capacity a few years later at third-party prices, much lower than Apple's prices. But it turned out to be a non-standard interface with expensive upgrades, and I didn't end up upgrading, just living with it. A few keys are getting a bit unreliable, but not enough to make is unusable.

The battery is still going surprisingly well after over 10 years of daily, intensive use, a lot of it on battery. It's down to 55% of design capacity. I think that's excellent compared with what I saw with the non-Apple laptops before, where I bought a number of third party batteries to carry around with me and swap, and they deteriorated faster. However the battery flakes out occasionally when the system is under load now.

I'm getting the battery replaced by Apple in a few weeks, at their standard battery repair fee (which is reasonable), and as a handy side effect of how they do this the keyboard issues should be fixed.

I'm in the market for a new laptop. But not because the current beauty doesn't work! It's just getting strained with not enough RAM and SSD for my needs now, and Homebrew no longer supported. (Especially precompiled binaries; some HB recipes fail to build, and some require several tens of GB free space to build and take over an hour per package, like I remember from my Gentoo days...). Whoever mentioned OpenCore Legacy Patcher, thanks for the reminder, that may help a lot!

I held out for the release of the Apple M3 over the last few years. Previously waiting for the M2 after I decided to take the leap from x86 to ARM, but that dragged out, and then I decided it was expensive and to wait for the M3 to see what 3nm would get us.

Now I'm excited to be planning to buy an M3 Max. I won't skimp on RAM or SSD this time, having learned it really slowed me a lot over the last few years, swapping (without realising for a few years this was why browsing was very janky), and often having to find things to delete to free up some space. Besides, the things I work on now use terabytes of storage, and for my tasks I think I'll find 128GB RAM useful too.

I plan to keep using my trusty 10 year old 2013 MBP as my main local x88, for x86 development and testing, running x86 Linux and Windows VMs, and as a baseline for GPU graphics dev where I want to have something near the slow end to target to ensure the software runs well for people who don't have the latest devices.

Re: The laptop that won't die

#167

Post by q-base »

aplummer wrote: post #4

I feel like this story is also relevant to the 2012 MacBook Pro and Air. My partner kept her air going for more than 10 years, and I saw people who for whatever reason (maybe keyboard or Touch Bar) hold on to those pros long past normal. So consider that another anecdote. Real data would be great here.

Is it feasible to keep old MacBook up to date with regards to security patches? I have an old Mid 2014 MBP, but unsure how "dangerous" it would be to keep using it still?

Re: The laptop that won't die

#168

Post by fsckboy »

paulpauper wrote: post #86
snitzr wrote: post #65

The 420 with Windows 7 is my personal idea of the peak of desktop computing. 2011 was also around the peak of computing in general considering it was right before social media turned hellish psyop and smartphones became distraction / disempowerment devices.

2004 was good too, minus the malware which at the time was really bad.

the adware back then that could install itself into your browser was insane! hello adaware, avast, and malwarebytes.

Re: The laptop that won't die

#169

Post by shlip »

I have 2 Dell Inspiron 1525 from 2008, still kicking bottoms as DAW under Manjaro. I used to have a a Dell Latitude d630 from 2007 running Debian fine in 2018 but I gave it away. Compared to my 2008 macbook pro, that cost me 1400€ at the time, and suddenly died on me 4 years later for no obvious reason (this series was subject to a recall campaign due to its nvidia 8600 gpu, but I missed the elegibility window by a few months). TBH though, my dad uses a 2009 macbookpro with W10 and it runs just fine with an SSD.

All in all, you never know, YMMV .

Re: The laptop that won't die

#170

Post by liendolucas »

stratosmacker wrote: post #43
noufalibrahim wrote: post #14

I can relate to this. I needed a laptop quickly and found a factory display piece on eBay. It was an x230. It must have been atleast a year old. I bought it. That was in 2013 or so. I'm still using it. Upgraded the Ram once. The current problems are a slow fan and a poor battery. I haven't fixed them yet but can probably do so. The thing still works. It's running an old Debian and is my primary machine.

Reading this on an X230! Check out a Kingsener battery (8400mAh) I get about 8 hours of mild use. [link]( https://www.aliexpress.us/item/2251832160992805.html )

Thank you so much for that link! Also in the X230 club and my battery died not long ago. Will give that battery a shot. I think the display needs to be changed as well and also unsure if purchase a replacement. Do you have any idea about a good screen replacement?
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