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I maintain a 17 year old ThinkPad

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Re: I maintain a 17 year old ThinkPad

#561

Post by MSFT_Edging »

winrid wrote: post #401
MSFT_Edging wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was sad when I bought a new 10th or 11th gen X1 carbon to replace my 4th gen. I configured them essentially the same, second-to-fastest processor, FHD display, no touch screen. The 4th gen almost never kicked its fans on, especially in Linux. The new one gets far hotter, even at idle. Lenovo removed the traditional sleep mode in favor of modern sleep, which causes it to die with the lid closed in a couple days comp…

My 6th gen carbon almost never gets hot as well. Maybe the gen you have has a CPU with a higher TDP? They got better again recently.

I can't keep the gens straight because I bought a late-model right after a new gen was released. It's definitely not the 9th because lenovo basically said "don't buy this", and it's the model before they added the awful external camera bump for a webcam I'd use 2x a year.

Ironically, battery life while actively using it is decent, not as good as the 4th gen, but I could squeeze 8 hours out of it. I use whatever cpu throttling utility that lives under the default KDE power controls. I trust it works because compilation times are quartered when you go from power saving to high performance.

Most of my complaints revolve around the fact I can't enable legacy sleep modes that actually save power. I blame microsoft for pushing their new sleep modes that mostly benefits windows.

Re: I maintain a 17 year old ThinkPad

#562

Post by p_ing »

neilv wrote: post #23
p_ing wrote: post #2

A 17 year old ThinkPad is going to have extremely limited utility for today's applications. You can browse the web****, sure. You can replace parts, yes. But it still performs like dogshit for today's applications. That said, I maintain a G4 Cube running an outdated OS to play Sim City and Sim Tower. And it's "upgraded" as much as possible. ****JavaScript not included

Web, including JavaScript, should work fine on that laptop. Until recently, my daily driver was the T500 (the larger screen version of the T400 in the article), and it worked fine for everything except GPU. (I actually downgraded to the T500 years ago, because I was pissed off about the Intel Management Engine.) Recently, I upgraded from the T500 to the T520, which is the last ThinkPad with a non-chiclet keyboard. It…

I'm sure window.open will work great, absolutely. HN will probably work wonders, too. nbcnews? new (arg) reddit?

We could go back a little more and find a great PII 400. I had one with a CL 3Dfx Voodoo2 12MB, though I forget the 2D card.

It played MP3s REALLY well! As long as that is all you wanted to do because anything else would introduce skips and pops.

I like old machines, but I would hardly call them day-to-day usable with modern apps, and I would question the underlying hardware/firmware security the rest of the way.

Re: I maintain a 17 year old ThinkPad

#563

Post by kwk1 »

JansjoFromIkea wrote: post #343
ajxs wrote: post #16

My x220 has traveled around the world multiple times. It's been through dozens of airport scanners, dropped multiple times, and shared a few cups of coffee with me by accident. It just keeps on kicking. My x220 running Debian is actually quicker and more responsive than my friend's modern Lenovo running Windows. I'd be tempted to upgrade to a lighter and thinner laptop, but I'm too attached to the keyboard.

Do you ever have any trouble at airports? The one time I ever had grief at an airport was a few years ago travelling with an X230 with the larger battery pack. Security seemed extremely suspicious of such an old laptop and I got stopped again later by a plain clothes security guy.

Identical setup here, and yes, checkpoint security at an airport in Germany pulled me to the side and made me turn it on to show it was a functioning laptop

Re: I maintain a 17 year old ThinkPad

#564

Post by axiologist »

organsnyder wrote: post #351
herbst wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a T420. A few years ago I switched to a slightly used T480, keyboard was a huge downgrade and the whole series can get really stupid USBC issues. After half a year or so it didn't dock anymore and I got an X1, basically the same laptop glad I found it without touch and the 'bright screen' because the screen is barely good enough, keyboard is the same and USBc already started to get finicky. Meanwhile my T420 s…

Yup, my T480 got upgraded to a Framework 13 after the T480's Thunderbolt port broke (known firmware issue that basically fried the chip). I loaned my T480 to someone about a year ago, and haven't bothered asking for it back. Meanwhile, my T410 works great as a workbench computer.

While not for the faint of heart, there is a fix for T480's broken Thunderbolt:

http://web.archive.org/web/20200318130144/https://posts.nadi...

Re: I maintain a 17 year old ThinkPad

#565

Post by JansjoFromIkea »

ajxs wrote: post #538
JansjoFromIkea wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you ever have any trouble at airports? The one time I ever had grief at an airport was a few years ago travelling with an X230 with the larger battery pack. Security seemed extremely suspicious of such an old laptop and I got stopped again later by a plain clothes security guy.

I've never had any problems! I'm surprised airport security would be so concerned about an old laptop. I'm sure they see way strange things on a daily basis.

did you have the regular battery or the larger one? Maybe it was something about the larger battery flagging some kind of screening process they have.

I was surprised too, I've brought far weirder and dodgy looking stuff through security

Re: I maintain a 17 year old ThinkPad

#566

Post by neilv »

p_ing wrote: post #562
neilv wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Web, including JavaScript, should work fine on that laptop. Until recently, my daily driver was the T500 (the larger screen version of the T400 in the article), and it worked fine for everything except GPU. (I actually downgraded to the T500 years ago, because I was pissed off about the Intel Management Engine.) Recently, I upgraded from the T500 to the T520, which is the last ThinkPad with a non-chiclet keyboard. It…

I'm sure window.open will work great, absolutely. HN will probably work wonders, too. nbcnews? new (arg) reddit? We could go back a little more and find a great PII 400. I had one with a CL 3Dfx Voodoo2 12MB, though I forget the 2D card. It played MP3s REALLY well! As long as that is all you wanted to do because anything else would introduce skips and pops. I like old machines, but I would hardly call them day-to-day…

I said it works, because I have firsthand daily-driver experience with it working.

If you're going to disagree, please give an example of something you think doesn't work.

Re: I maintain a 17 year old ThinkPad

#567

Post by neilv »

RavSS wrote: post #548
neilv wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know an exceedingly credible source for the firmware modifications? (Last time I looked, it had the air of the XDA-style culture: "To root your phone, download this package from a `.ru` piracy site, run the `.exe` on your PC, then install and run the closed blobs on your phone, including rooting and replacing your bootloader with one, we know you will trust us." Though, in their defense, if they were organized…

That is the general nature of reverse engineering efforts, but this one has been documented enough that you don't need to blindly trust completely random executables or code from strange places. You can manually recreate the process of building a patch for the embedded controller instead of just following instructions: https://github.com/hamishcoleman/thinkpad-ec . Here's the presentation by the author himself at lin…

Excellent, thank you.

Re: I maintain a 17 year old ThinkPad

#568

Post by kjkjadksj »

My 2012 macbook pro would have still been working today had an unfortunate water damage incident not happen a couple years ago. It was theseuses macbook in a way. Trackpad had been replaced. Microphone replaced. Battery replace. RAM upgraded to 16gb. SSD upgrade. Disk drive swapped out and replaced with hard drive caddy making use of that extra SATAIII. It was no slouch. Sure it was only a dual core but 2.5ghz is plenty for a lot of things and most software doesn’t even make much use of multithreading anyhow. Not anything I’d try and run on that computer at least. It could handle creative suite and that was enough. Older games like TF2 worked great too like 80 or 100fps with a little config wonking. I can’t even get my replacement m3 pro running TF2 that well albeit over wine because valve doesn’t like arm.

Re: I maintain a 17 year old ThinkPad

#569

Post by [deleted] »

brewtide wrote: post #527
urda wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How do you think policy of any sort gets it's origin? Same token, sounds like you're arguing, not doing.

[deleted]

Re: I maintain a 17 year old ThinkPad

#570

Post by E39M5S62 »

anon6362 wrote: post #467

T480 (non-s) - Love the dual batteries (one swappable) unavailable on Apple-design infested T490 - Retrofitted with magnesium top case and bezel mod - 5 extended 72 Whr batteries with a third-party external charger from some dude in the UK - Upgraded to fastest processor and discrete GPU (slow on its own but I use a Razer Core X eGPU with an Nvidia RTX 3070 Ti, and can run basically any game on Steam.) - 32 GiB of RA…

What is the magnesium top case and bezel mod? Will any Intel AX210 card work, or do I have to somehow patch the T480's firmware to update the wifi whitelist?
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