Same, but just because I'm lazy and cheap.
I maintain a 17 year old ThinkPad
161–170 of 595 posts
Re: I maintain a 17 year old ThinkPad
#162Of course he does. Because of the robustness but also the keyboard. It's so annoying that they don't make decently build laptops, at all, these days.
I'm hanging on to my X201. I bought it after I left my workplace where I had an X230; and I choose an earlier model because I wanted to upgrade rather than downgrade my computer. I am _much_ more satisfied with the X201 - because of the keyboard of course. IIANM, X220 is the best one of the X series.
I replaced the HDD with an SSD about 8 years ago and expanded the RAM to 8 GB, and performance is tolerable. At the moment I'm running Lubuntu on it, but I'm thinking of switching to Q4OS.
Now, sure, it's old; and yes, it's a bit rickety plastics-wise after having survived a fall from 3m at some point; and yes, the battery life is limited even after replacing it.
But - I would take it over a modern piece-of-@#$%-keyboard machine any day of the week.
Re: I maintain a 17 year old ThinkPad
#163I 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…
>Framework laptops are wonderful, modern and (arguably?) cheaper to own in the long-term thanks to being able to replace components, particularly the entire mainboard as time progresses.
They are also bulky and battery life is not great.
To upgrade it you have to buy a mainboard which is quite expensive.
I found that I am better by selling my old laptop and buying a new one.
Re: I maintain a 17 year old ThinkPad
#164I 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…
> Framework laptops are wonderful
No they're not. They have the sake kind of atrocious low-travel keyboards that almost-all (or all) other laptops these days have. And - for many of us - the most important piece of hardware in a laptop is the keyboard.
Re: I maintain a 17 year old ThinkPad
#165I 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…
>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 (and the "modern web") worsen
That's true for every computer. But people still buy old C64, Amiga, Atari, IBM or Apple computers.
Re: I maintain a 17 year old ThinkPad
#166My R60 which I got around in c. 2005 still works with Linux mint. I replaced the HDD and battery, but rest of the stuff including the orange light (to be used as night light) on top of screen frame still works! The hinges are a bit loose, so they need some support at times.
Re: I maintain a 17 year old ThinkPad
#167The tightness of hardware integration isn't a bug, it's genuinely a feature; In fact, it's the defining feature that makes Apple hardware great. Socketed RAM, CPU, and Storage just weren't worth the tradeoffs, namely size, weight, cost, and performance. Including those modular interfaces just wasn't worth it when the internal interfaces would be obsolete within 5 years, and the average user was replacing sub-componen…
> Socketed RAM CUDIMM is changeable and fast. > The user being able to swap parts easily is _neat_ but it's just not an required feature Mostly because people seem to have forgotten that it was possible. Often laptops are slow to due either a too full disk and/or not enough memory. It used to be more common to upgrade those. But apparently that knowledge/skill is forgotten and it's now more custom to buy a new device…
It's faster, but a big reason apple silicon is ahead is because the memory is co-packaged on an MCM. This is the direction things are going.
Re: I maintain a 17 year old ThinkPad
#168The tightness of hardware integration isn't a bug, it's genuinely a feature; In fact, it's the defining feature that makes Apple hardware great. Socketed RAM, CPU, and Storage just weren't worth the tradeoffs, namely size, weight, cost, and performance. Including those modular interfaces just wasn't worth it when the internal interfaces would be obsolete within 5 years, and the average user was replacing sub-componen…
Since display technology does not update as fast as CPU technology, and keyboard technology rarely updates anymore at all, you might still expect the entire mainboard assembly to be upgradeable.
Would certainly be more "green."
Re: I maintain a 17 year old ThinkPad
#169I have an IBM T42, but I have the supervisor password set that I have long forgotten. I know about ways to clear the password (if they indeed work) but I have not gotten around it. If anyone knows a solution that does work, feel free to share.
It is in a mint condition, not a single scratch, and I don't want to throw it out for sure. I have an old OpenBSD on it, it is perfect for some light C coding using mg. :)
Re: I maintain a 17 year old ThinkPad
#170I have an X201 (15 years old) and X220 (14 years) that I regularly use, running different flavors of linux. they've both been repaired and upgraded a few times. I'm spoiled by having an M2 Macbook as a daily driver - they can't match it for speed - but I love the ruggedness and resilience and I always will.