There was this famous guy, which sold custom old Thinkpads, but with newer mainboards and Intel 10th gen chips in it, with custom USB-C adapters and all. At some point he kind of disappeared and rumors appeared that he is now in mandatory military service, but will come back afterwards. Well, that was pre-COVID. He also knows a friend that backports coreboot to the new mainboards. No idea how they manage to do that i…
India's repair culture gives new life to dead laptops
131–140 of 203 posts
Re: India's repair culture gives new life to dead laptops
#132If the thinkpad community gets behind this, there will be a market for upspecced thinkpads as long as supplies last. the reduce re-use re-cycle part here is nicely inserting itself into the recycle tail side.
It's such a pity 51nb's upgraded ThinkPad project is no longer quite as active as it was. I think the small niche market for hacker-friendly laptops is far too diluted now, especially with qualitatively unique products like the MNT Reform. https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/1dh04ud/how_do_ge...
There are others...
Re: India's repair culture gives new life to dead laptops
#133I remember up to the early 1990's we had repair shops all over Portugal, we would buy devices for life, and any kind of malfunction would be rescued at one of those repair shops, unless it was really a death sentence for the device. Now in a throw away society with planned obsolence devices, most of those shops are gone and the repair knowledge gone with them. Unless goverments fix the planned obsolence culture it is…
We still have here in Switzerland "repair cafes" run by volunteers, where mostly elderly bring their usually outdated devices to be repaired, while having a coffee and socializing. It works, as long it works...
I think it would be fun to volunteer at a repair clinic, but there's none nearby and it probably wouldn't work well with a low population density rural area.
Re: India's repair culture gives new life to dead laptops
#134A few years ago, I wanted to add more RAM to a Lenovo laptop. I opened the thing, remove the RAM, and like a complete idiot, switched on the power without any RAM in the slot. The laptop refused to start. I took it to the Lenovo center and they said about 7-10 days and a minimum of Rs 10,000 (about $150 in those days). Since this was too much for an old laptop, I looked for alternatives. Someone suggested a repair sh…
>I opened the thing, remove the RAM, and like a complete idiot, switched on the power without any RAM in the slot.
>The laptop refused to start.
>I took it to the Lenovo center [...]
This makes no sense. Why didn't you just replace the RAM? I seriously doubt starting the laptop without RAM bricks the laptop.
Re: India's repair culture gives new life to dead laptops
#135Happens a lot in China too. https://www.hwcooling.net/en/recycling-in-china-laptop-cpus-...
Here's a somewhat cyberpunk-ish fact I learned today: Back in '98 Taiwan, unbranded, mysterious desktop CPUs called Golden Soldier ("黄金戦士") were available in the street. It turns out they were actually modded mobile Intel CPUs installed in slockets.
https://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/article/980618/parts4.ht... https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%BB%84%E9%87%91%E6%88%A6%E5...
BTW, speaking of repair culture, I love this idea of repurposed headless MacBooks.
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Screenless-MacBooks-masqueradi...
Re: India's repair culture gives new life to dead laptops
#136If the thinkpad community gets behind this, there will be a market for upspecced thinkpads as long as supplies last. the reduce re-use re-cycle part here is nicely inserting itself into the recycle tail side.
Abhas Abhinav of Deeproot Linux runs "Mostly Harmless" which sells refurbished Thinkpads with binary blobs removed. https://mostlyharmless.io/computers/
That is super cool.
Re: India's repair culture gives new life to dead laptops
#137It's simple, the labour cost for repair is lower than the replacement cost, we also have people scavenging for valuables in landfills. As/When India will become rich enough, this will become uneconomical. Long term solution is to force companies to build products with repairability in mind.
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I agree with the basic premise of your argument. The reason why I dislike certain products like Apple's is because of my professional background in electronics. But the way you presented it is definitely not the way to do it - flipping people off most certainly won't convince people to reconsider their ways. Instead, if people could see the economic and environmental damage cause by such consumerism in person, I'm sure that many would have a change of heart. It just doesn't hit you until you see for yourself what you're contributing to.
Re: India's repair culture gives new life to dead laptops
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's such a pity 51nb's upgraded ThinkPad project is no longer quite as active as it was. I think the small niche market for hacker-friendly laptops is far too diluted now, especially with qualitatively unique products like the MNT Reform. https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/1dh04ud/how_do_ge...
There are others... https://www.tpart.net/
Wow, just about to be shipped, too! Now if only I had a cool $1299++ :(
Re: India's repair culture gives new life to dead laptops
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
My Asus 1215B netbook from 2009 has served me well, until it died last year. There was nothing in 2025 laptops that I would have replaced it for, the use cases haven't changed from my 2009 requirements in computing on the go with a cheap laptop like device. Its replacement is now Samsung tablet with DEX capabilities, which I will likewise use until it dies.
Cheap netbook-like devices are widely available from China these days. They'll probably be cheap enough even accounting for the new tariffs. Or you can just buy an older 'ultrabook' laptop on the used market.
They might be, but I rather favour the local businesses.
Re: India's repair culture gives new life to dead laptops
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
My Asus 1215B netbook from 2009 has served me well, until it died last year. There was nothing in 2025 laptops that I would have replaced it for, the use cases haven't changed from my 2009 requirements in computing on the go with a cheap laptop like device. Its replacement is now Samsung tablet with DEX capabilities, which I will likewise use until it dies.
The 1366x768 resolution is small, there are websites which are hard to use at that resolution.
Not everything needs a retina screen to be usable.