281–290 of 344 posts
Few years ago it has "fan error" on boot. So I dissemble whole laptop to get to fan (reserve whole evening) and finally put a tinny amount of vaseline on the fan shaft, put new paste on CPU/GPU and it still works. Silent and temperatures wont go above 60°C. Power comsumption on idle is however high to nowadays standard. About 42W.
I honestly cannot imagine more durable laptop that kids use today.
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Excuse me sir, you are interrupting our Thinkpad circletrek, begone with your Dell heresy. I absolutely love my cute little Thinkpad X230T, but finding a battery for that fits the T variant is a pain in the butt in my country, I tried like a 6-7 in the shop but they were all old and dead, very little market for them so they stayed unused and died out, I am limping along on my 15-minute battery for now. I believe Leno…
The TPM requirement can be easily bypassed with a registry key.
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I love my zero 2w as a development machine. For web browsing I try to use w3m when possible. In headless model (using mosh to access), I can even disable 2 cpu cores with acceptable performance. "Each part upgradable and replaceable" -> super agree this point. You can clone microsd easily. So if microsd die, you swap the microsd. And if the board die, you just insert the microsd to another zero 2w and everything come…
Wait, how can you use a web browser on Pi Zero 2W? Simple static web pages take ages to render on mine. What is your configuration?
I was thinking about this the other day when I was using my 11 year old X1 Carbon. It was used an abused for most of those years and aside from the battery which doesn't have the life it used to, everything else works just as well as it did when it came out of the box (oh, and the 3G modem that will stop working soon) My 2017 MacBook Pro on the other hand was comparatively coddled, yet in spite of Apple's quality eng…
The new 2019-2023 models are too recent to judge, but seem to be back on track resiliency wise.
I don't have a medium account so I can only see the first paragraph ish, but I will comment that I used to daily drive a thinkpad T440p that I bought off ebay for ~$140, and ran arch linux on it. I was living the dream every article or think-piece like this seems to believe in. I now (for a laptop) use an M1 pro macbook pro. The reason why I was open to buying a new laptop at all is because I had gotten used to watch…
At the same time, keep in mind that the biggest tradeoff tends to be convenience. For example, a YouTube script plus local video player, such as MPV, works a treat on these older machines. Even if some video formats don't work great, you a) actually have an option for converting [0], and b) you are dropping all of the cycles spent on the non-video-watching parts of a YouTube video page.
Yes, that tends to make watching a 10 minute video kind of annoying when you spend a minute or two just on the overhead of downloading/opening/deleting it. Personally, I've sometimes found that to be a subtle push to read more text-based content instead of watching a bunch of videos. Similarly, it pushes me to favor longer-form videos that might involve more information and/or subtleties that the shorter videos might skip over (perhaps largely for SEO reasons).
All of that might or might not be a net-positive or even a possibility depending on needs, of course.
I've found a lot of personal motivation and fulfillment by looking for those sorts of alternate ways of doing things. Sometimes, slowing down (in more ways than just FLOPS) can lead you down rabbit holes that are not only fulfilling and interesting, but educational. [1]
Your point that it's bad advice to "just buy an [old] used laptop" definitely stands, but I'll just amend it with the caveat of "... depending on your needs/uses". To each their own.
[0]: There are also in-browser tricks/plugins for making the YouTube site itself lighter, but personally, I find throwing more instructions into the browser to be somewhat counterproductive. A bit like calculating how much extra fuel you need in order to carry the additional fuel, etc. The tradeoff is convenience, of course.
[1]: I'm also lucky to no longer have to deal with things like customers breathing down my neck with deadlines. So if I spend an extra 5 minutes doing something that used to take me 2 minutes, that's fine.
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The author put this behind a paywall. How is that any different to you than Substack or the NYTimes?
The paywall is the author's choice and anyone is free to reject creating a Medium account, no damage done on either side. OP's second objection on the other hand looks less "rejectable" than a paywall because the damage is done before you have the chance to reject it: > By using Medium, you agree to our Privacy Policy, including cookie policy. Medium's implicit assumption that by clicking on their link the user accep…
> Please don't use Medium, post to Medium, or share Medium links.
There was no implication people don't have a choice to keep using terrible software.
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…
fwiw, thinkpad/lenovo isn't the only team* can assemble a pc properly. its just that they tend to keep working even after you drop them and spill coffee on them and come with an escape key. *] it's really the sub-culture/team behind thinkpads that we appreciate, which ironically isn't normally distributed throughout all of Lenovo.
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The paywall is the author's choice and anyone is free to reject creating a Medium account, no damage done on either side. OP's second objection on the other hand looks less "rejectable" than a paywall because the damage is done before you have the chance to reject it: > By using Medium, you agree to our Privacy Policy, including cookie policy. Medium's implicit assumption that by clicking on their link the user accep…
OP made a plea, not a demand: > Please don't use Medium, post to Medium, or share Medium links. There was no implication people don't have a choice to keep using terrible software.
The person I was replying to above only referred to the paywall issue when I think the main basis for the initial plea to avoid Medium was the second point, Medium's objectionable or illegal practices (not just "terrible") against its users. It's sensible to plea not using it or at least not promoting it here.