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I maintain a 17 year old ThinkPad

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Re: I maintain a 17 year old ThinkPad

#61

Post by rmnclmnt »

coro_1 wrote: post #54

From what I know the entire purpose of the Macbook "Pro" line is literally that they're made to be modular. They were at least. I maintain a 2011 Pro. The build quality is noticeably nicer than the cheaper chassis they produce today. The experience itself is actually much nicer too, smoother, feels better. Added, modern displays have great resolution. But the aged units carry an interesting and rich in depth projecti…

Agreed. Brought back to life my MBP 2015 last summer (battery replacement, keyboard replacement, thermal paste, etc) and thanks to OpenCore Legacy Patcher, now running latest MacOS versions ensuring at least 3 years more of security patches. Also these machines run Linux and Windows pretty fine

Re: I maintain a 17 year old ThinkPad

#62

Post by BrenBarn »

I'm really bummed to see how newer ThinkPads have given up that modularity. Some components are necessarily more integrated, and I was never going to be too sad if it was easier to buy a new laptop than to replace the CPU. But the fact that you could, for instance, trivially replace the hard drive made it ludicrously easy to get a lot of extra mileage out of old ThinkPads.

Re: I maintain a 17 year old ThinkPad

#63

Post by rkagerer »

I still drive a Dell Precision M6600 from 2011, and liken the build quality, robustness and modularity of that era of the product line to the Thinkpads being discussed here.

I'm overdue to upgrade, but know I won't love its replacement anywhere near as much.

Re: I maintain a 17 year old ThinkPad

#64

Post by Rediscover »

ekianjo wrote: post #19
fishgoesblub wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until you're able to somehow transplant a T420 keyboard into a Framework, I'm staying on my ThinkPad either until it dies, or the heat death of the universe. whichever comes first ;-)

Right. Fantastic keyboards. Nothing comes close in recent laptops.

Older ThinkPad (pre-2008) snob checking in. The only recent laptops with decent keyboards (that I have found) are from MNT Research.

https://mntre.com/

Re: I maintain a 17 year old ThinkPad

#65

Post by arp242 »

markus_zhang wrote: post #26

I still use my T470S as a Ubuntu 22.04 development machine. I bought it from my pre-pre-company as a used one back in 2022 and it is a fantastic laptop for personal projects. The only update I did was a 16GB RAM to up the memory to 20GB. I also bought a new battery as one of the two was dead. I wish the graphic driver could be better as playing Youtube videos constantly crashes Firefox on Ubuntu. Other than that I ha…

> I wish the graphic driver could be better as playing Youtube videos constantly crashes Firefox on Ubuntu

Do you have the xf86-video-intel driver installed? Try removing that package and just relying on the kernel modesetting DRI driver instead. That's been the recommended way to run Intel graphics for long time now.

I don't know if that's your issue, but it this caused a lot of weird issues on my x270 with Firefox.

Re: I maintain a 17 year old ThinkPad

#66

Post by neilv »

askvictor wrote: post #52
neilv wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the few things I'd change about the X220 is the strange 2-piece lid. (What looks like a cosmetic flourish in the lid is actually a seam.) Two of the four used X220 units I've bought arrived with the lid end piece wiggling, because it was no longer firmly attached to the main piece. The X200 and almost every other ThinkPad managed just fine with a 1-piece lid, including being rugged against drops, so I don't kn…

I provisioned several hundred x220's for the school I was working at, figuring they were the most bomb-proof thing at the time. The lid section you're talking about was definitively not bomb-proof. Thankfully, it didn't make much difference to the operation of the laptop, but still pretty annoying.

Good to know I wasn't just unlucky.

Did you find any typical repairs for the lid section?

(I haven't opened up my wiggly units yet, but I guess probably it got banged, and either screws were stripped out of their holes, or some internal plastic piece snapped.)

Re: I maintain a 17 year old ThinkPad

#68

Post by j45 »

CursedSilicon wrote: post #6

I wish that Framework could attain the same lofty levels of "second hand market success" that ThinkPads enjoy. A lot of the "Thinkpad fans" I've talked to genuinely want them, or respect them for similar reasons they enjoy the ThinkPad legacy. ThinkPads are durable but every day they get older, slower and more difficult to source parts for as collectors entrench themselves and the requirements of operating systems (a…

When Frameworks first came out, there was doubt that they couldn't last a year.

Or launch multiple lines.

Longevity is built one step at a time. Voting with dollars only helps it become an option enough and signal to other manufacturers to consider similar ways.

Re: I maintain a 17 year old ThinkPad

#70

Post by ruleryak »

I booted up my Thinkpad 760 XL from 1997 recently and let it run for a couple days. My WinZip was more than 9000 days past expiration, and it counted up one by one, the number just spinning ever upward for the better part of half an hour. 2 of the 3 batteries I had for it still charged to above 90% and drained at the normal rate, so I could still run it unplugged for around 6 hours. The batteries were modular, so you could have a cdrom, floppy, or battery in the first bay and a battery in the second bay. I normally ran it with 2 batteries and an external pcmcia cdrom that ran on double-a's. For a 28 year old laptop, it was still incredibly usable.
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