X220 for the compact version. With the 9 cell? Hnnnngg
I recommend getting the X230 over the X220, if anyone decides to play with these old Thinkpads. I have both machines, and I found heat dissipation has been significantly reduced on the X230 for otherwise the same performance, thanks to Ivy Bridge's die shrink over Sandy Bridge. Most components from both machines are interchangeable with the exception of their bottom covers and motherboards (an EC firmware hack is ava…
x230 can take 16GB RAM. only some x220s will.
slightly different keyboard layouts also, wrt pgup pgdown
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 t…
This —- I really don’t care if my blog with no user registration or comments gets accessed over HTTP/1.1 without an SSL cert. Further, I find the way Chrome handles HSTS pretty gross, as some of us actually tinker with stuff that REALLY doesn’t need encryption, like little dev boards and projects running locally. Chrome makes those exceedingly difficult to use, thus the need for extremely convoluted workarounds like https://github.com/ip2k/I-Dont-Care-About-HSTS-For-Localhost (it’s my repo).
I was using a ~2011 x220 as my personal laptop until 2021 or so, when I replaced it with an X1 carbon. This lasted almost 2 years until it stopped charging, and Lenovo wanted more than the laptop was worth to repair it.
I've since switched back to the x220. Whilst I miss the extra memory and CPU grunt, it gets the job done. When this one finally dies I'm not sure what will replace it, but it certainly won't be another Lenovo.
The 2016+ era MBPs were awful. The previous 2 generations were good, but had their occasional issues. Like the drive cable on the unibody MBP. I got 7 years out of a 2012 Air. The jury is still out on the m1 era, but it's looking better. We'll know for sure in about 5 years.
Yeah agree there. I had a 2010 MBP that I rather liked. The M1 era isn't looking good based on the number of bricked/dead and iCloud locked machines I see on eBay either corporate discards or damaged and not worth repairing. Also low quantities of parts on the market as well. Older MacBooks and PCs were usually pretty heavily shredded for parts but the same is definitely not true for the new ones. I suspect we've ent…
I still use my 2013 mbp for my daily home computer. Couldn’t be happier with it for my use cases.
Wife uses a mid-2013 Macbook Air as a daily driver still after >10 years, works in academia. What happened is simply that CPU stopped being the thing that made stuff slow, so a mid-2010s upper midrange can still hold its own today, ssd was already good then, and memory plateaued around 8gb for entry level machines some 5 years ago. So as long as your thermals don't suck, your ssd doesn't smoke out, and your keyboard…
Even more so with desktops. I am running a 2014 CPU i7 4790k with 32GB RAM and a 1070ti. Due to it being a desktop w noctua cooler the temps never get high. Keyboard and mouse you just replace when worn out. This year I am thinking about upgrading. But my 2019 Thinkpad already feels slow... so I never got laptops for long use. They suck.
Yeah, I got used to desktops with RAID, powerful GPUs, large nice monitors, etc back in the early 2000s and laptops never feel fast. They can’t be — I don’t care how many benchmark results say otherwise, a machine with a given size square inches worth of silicon at a given nm scale using a 130 watt power adapter isn’t going to break the laws of physics and beat a desktop drawing 800 watts with 2-5x as much same-nm silicon. Especially now that I’ve gotten into video editing and stuff like generative visuals for music, you really notice where they’re saving power on laptops when switching between a desktop and laptop RTX 4090 + 16-core CPU.
What are you claiming was improved compared to Win2K? As far as I can remember everything after that was dumbed-down UI and pointless security clickthroughs.
Win+arrow keys for docking to sides I use all the time. Much better multi monitor support. Grouping taskbar. Start menu that lets you search (ie to run notepad, press win then start typing note.. and hit enter)
The search box in the start menu was a huge improvement for me. And AeroSnap to a lesser degree. On MATE, I set Win+arrow keys to do the same thing.
While everyone is bragging about their old ThinkPads, I am typing these on a Pi Zero 2W. I spilt coffee on my ~8 years old HP Laptop two weeks ago. While waiting for my parents to buy me an iPhone 15 Pro (with its USB-C to connect to the monitor) I am using a Pi Zero 2W + Asus Zenscreen Portable Monitor + 10.000 mAH Powerbank setup, connecting to my server via RDP. Github Pro student credits on DigitalOcean, all free…
The problem I have with the zero 2w is that building anything on it seems to knock out the wifi. I've got a couple on the local network as terminals and if I try to build (e.g.) a recent python interpreter, the ssh connection dies to the extent that I have to power-cycle them. I presume they're just going into swap, but they never come back. Now that's not your use-case if you've got a remote server and all you're using them for is a thin client, but they aren't exactly usable as general purpose devices.
I do like the sound of that setup, though. Portable monitor plus powerbank is neat, and I can't help wondering if that plus a wireguard network wouldn't be the right way to do things away from home. There are more efficient SBCs but if the screen is the big drain that's exactly the choice I'd make too.