Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I maintain a 17 year old ThinkPad

pilledtexts.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

511–520 of 595 posts

Re: I maintain a 17 year old ThinkPad

#511

Post by Melatonic »

bjpirt wrote: post #227

I've been pondering the same thought recently but applied to analog cameras. Analog cameras have evolved over time, approximately according to the following: - fully mechanical - mechanical shutter with light meter - electronic control of shutter, mechanical advance - fully electronic shutter and advance Broadly, what I'm finding after digging in to restoring some cameras is that most of the cameras from the first st…

The second category is my personal favorite - bought a used and slightly beat up Nikon FM2n when I was in college for cheap and the thing is still trucking with no maintenance done 15 years later. Shutter speeds seem at least reasonably accurate and it only requires a battery for the light meter. All mechanical otherwise.

Or if you want to get fancy the Nikon FM3a gives you sort of the best of all worlds (all mechanical internals or battery powered auto exposure with the flip of a dial)

Re: I maintain a 17 year old ThinkPad

#512

Post by Melatonic »

Saris wrote: post #464
piuantiderp wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One does not use the trackpad in a thinkpad. If anything they should be removed. The old keyboards are a dream to type on... Only computer that came close (that I had was HP DV1000)

Yeah I've tried the little track nub things but they don't work well for me, a good track pad is much quicker.

It takes a decent amount of practice and you need to adjust the sensitivity settings. Eventually though I would say they can be more accurate than most trackpads (excluding a good Apple trackpad - those are great)

The real advantage though is your hands never need to leave the keyboard between mouse and typing (for speed)

Re: I maintain a 17 year old ThinkPad

#513

Post by sitkack »

urda wrote: post #421
sitkack wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not. If we continue to sit on our hands talk down about "most people" aren't interested in XYZ, we are the problem. Armchair dipshits like to slag on Louis Rossmann, but did lead repair sessions where he would teach people how to do hot air pcb rework. Dude walks the talk and empowers people. You are missing my point.

You’re venting, not arguing. Teaching three people doesn’t scale, and anecdotes aren’t data. No one’s dismissing Rossmann or the value of empowerment. The problem is acting like isolated efforts equal systemic change. If this were as easy as you claim, the landscape would reflect that. So yes, you’re missing the point. Passion is fine, but without policy, infrastructure, and incentives, it goes nowhere.

> without policy, infrastructure, and incentives, it goes nowhere.

So how do we start?

Re: I maintain a 17 year old ThinkPad

#514

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

normie3000 wrote: post #400
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #346

There's a fallacy often repeated for computers: "It's lasted a long time so it's going to keep lasting a long time." The thing is, failure of computer hardware is often due to manufacturing flaws. There's many that could have flaws, and they're subject to (varying) environmental stresses (both at build time at run time), so there's many failure modes. It's difficult to know exactly when a server might fail. It might…

> But what's clear is that failure isn't less likely as the machine gets older, it's more likely. Is this true? Doesn't most hardware have a dip in failure rate in the middle of its average lifespan?

It depends on the components. The bathtub curve applies the most manufactured equipment in some way. But specific kinds of hardware are more prone to it than others. Hard drives, fans, power supplies, dedicated controllers, RAM and CPU modules, etc all fail at different rates. Combine that with the varying failure rates of different grades of components, with manufacturer/model differences, environmental differences, and load differences, and it's all over the map. But in general, any one of these components is effectively a system failure, so there is always this varying degree of failure over time due to the fluctuation of all these variables.

I also believe there's a psychic component to failures. The machines know when you're close to product launch, or when someone has just discovered the servers haven't been maintained in a while and are at risk of failing. Then they'll fail for sure. Especially if there are hot-spare or backup servers, which will conveniently fail as well.

Re: I maintain a 17 year old ThinkPad

#515

Post by Melatonic »

bobjordan wrote: post #344

I’ve been using my 10-year-old ThinkPad X250 and a decade-old workstation without feeling any need to upgrade. However, the possibility of running powerful local LLMs that require a lot of GPU or unified memory has finally increased my interest. It's my impression that laptops likely won’t see the major leap required in that area to run truely large LLMs for another 5–10 years, but I expect workstation capabilities t…

The new Nvidia developer workstations (believe they are much cheaper than full DGX systems) are definitely interesting.

I have a desktop with a Titan XP (somewhat similar to your Titan X). If you look up LLM performance however these older GPUs (even with enough VRAM) do quite poorly. They still hold up great for gaming and many other GPU hungry tasks though.

Personally I think a really cool setup would be something like a modern MacBook Pro with a ton of RAM and high core CPU that could be plugged into an external GPU enclosure when needed. Depending on LLM needs you could be upgrading the external GPU and still use the power efficient laptop on the go.

Re: I maintain a 17 year old ThinkPad

#516

Post by Melatonic »

dopadelic wrote: post #480

I used my T420 up till 2021. I upgraded the screen to a 1920x1080 IPS panel. SSD. I have a full-fledged workstation for anything that needs heavy lifting and I primarily used the laptop as a device to remote into my workstation. It was perfectly fine for standard web browsing and youtube.

How hard was it to upgrade the screen ?

Re: I maintain a 17 year old ThinkPad

#517

Post by Melatonic »

bigpeopleareold wrote: post #106
pengaru wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

kingsener batteries from aliexpress have been highly recommended in the past, but I haven't bought any yet.

I bought a few. Only one was decent and still use it. For one of them I had, it never calibrated correctly and I think it was surging the motherboard (backlight on my screen just stopped working one day, but the computer just would keep turning off with it, leading to a lot of 'hold the power button down to clear the capacitors') ... the other one just doesn't charge past 65% anymore. Maybe that's a calibration issue…

iFixit also sells batteries although I have no idea how good they are. I thought their toolsets were decent value for the money though (and they'll probably be around as a company for awhile).

Re: I maintain a 17 year old ThinkPad

#518

Post by Melatonic »

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…

You could also try turning off hardware acceleration although that might kill performance.

Not sure if the T470S had the Nvidia option but disabling Optimus (and going either fully with the Nvidia chip or integrated intel GPU) can also solve issues sometimes

Re: I maintain a 17 year old ThinkPad

#519

Post by vermaden »

I daily use FreeBSD on 2011 (14 years old now) legendary ThinkPad W520.

Details here:

- https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2022/04/14/freebsd-13-1-on-th...

Article is about FreeBSD 13.1 - but as time passed I followed all new versions and its at 14.2 now.

Config did not changed - still running strong.

Re: I maintain a 17 year old ThinkPad

#520

Post by Melatonic »

qzx_pierri wrote: post #493

I have a T450 with a issue that I haven’t been able to figure out for years: When I shut the lid, the screen will shut off, and when I open the lid again, I can hear the fans spinning and I know the laptop is on, but the screen WILL NOT TURN BACK ON. I have to hold the power button to force power off and then start it up again. Issue happens in Windows and Linux. I tried disabling the sleep enhancement feature in the…

Did you disable hibernation ? Is the screen just turning off or is it going to sleep?

Always recommend fully disabling hibernation in windows as it's useless - if it's NOT going to sleep then might be worth messing with the BIOS power settings

Post reply on HN