My dad is a moderate laptop user, but gets easily frustrated with poor performance, sometimes he uses PCB applications for hobby projects.After his last laptop died, we evaluated new vs. used laptops and we found a nicely taken care of T440 with a 3rd gen i5. I've had some additional RAM laying around and a new SSD (totaling 8/128) and the thing flies, he is very satisfied. For the money I don't thing we could have bought a machine with comparable performance from the store. Even the battery holds about an 60-90 minutes which is ok for him. He needs it portable, but not autonomous.
Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)
61–70 of 295 posts
Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)
#622011 Lenovo Thinkpad X220 daily user here. Really nice machine really for my needs, running the latest Debian smoothly. I do have a spare ready to take over if needed. Old hardware could always die very suddenly. It's a frugal solution, both cheaper and more ecological than buying new.
without hd videos and gaming a x61 is good enough, I wish I could plug a tiny vpu for the occasional hd live stream though
Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)
#63Most 8-10 year old laptops are perfectly fine if you put an SSD in them. I just upgraded a 2011 mbp from 4GB and spinning disk to 8GB and SSD. The difference is remarkable. It wasn’t usable at all (as in trivial things like logging in could take minutes) and now it’s snappy.
Old laptops without such upgrades aren’t really viable these days unless you work all day in a terminal.
Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)
#64My dad is a moderate laptop user, but gets easily frustrated with poor performance, sometimes he uses PCB applications for hobby projects.After his last laptop died, we evaluated new vs. used laptops and we found a nicely taken care of T440 with a 3rd gen i5. I've had some additional RAM laying around and a new SSD (totaling 8/128) and the thing flies, he is very satisfied. For the money I don't thing we could have b…
4th gen i5
Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)
#65Middle management at my $FORTUNE_500 was the opposite, and I'd been using a 10 year old laptop for development with the exception of an SSD upgrade a wonderful IT dude gifted me when he saw that the mandatory malware scanner was eating 100% of the drive bandwidth almost all the time. So if your workplace is good to you with new systems be thankful. I didn't get mine until IT was outsourced and the outsourced guys cou…
Feel free to ignore if you don't want to answer, but why do you put up with this? Why not go to another company that isn't so ridiculously stingy with hardware?
Yeah, you're basically causing more problems than you're solving if you're stingy with hardware to that degree. My company is smart about it, IMO - cheapest new MBP 13 variant (no touchbar from 2017), but maxes out SSD and RAM. It's light, thin, and has great battery life for office work and plugs into a provided thunderbolt dock at a desk.
Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)
#66I'm assuming OP is running Ubuntu 16.04 since 18.04 lacks support for 32-bit. Sounds like OP is a very casual linux user so maybe would rather not invest any effort into it, but Fedora still supports 32-bit and makes an amazing desktop experience. Highly recommend trying it out. It might render the software complaints moot since a lot has changed in 3 years.
Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)
#67Middle management at my $FORTUNE_500 was the opposite, and I'd been using a 10 year old laptop for development with the exception of an SSD upgrade a wonderful IT dude gifted me when he saw that the mandatory malware scanner was eating 100% of the drive bandwidth almost all the time. So if your workplace is good to you with new systems be thankful. I didn't get mine until IT was outsourced and the outsourced guys cou…
Feel free to ignore if you don't want to answer, but why do you put up with this? Why not go to another company that isn't so ridiculously stingy with hardware?
I'm not the parent, but I think it's hard to tell what a company's hardware/software policies are. I'm at my second job out of undergrad and both have bait-and-switched me by promising that I'd get to use Linux but having a Windows spinning rust machine waiting for me. I've had to fight just to bring in my own ergonomic mouse. Some companies really care more about controlling you than productivity.
Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)
#68/tpg/ on /g/ is probably my favorite aspect of 4chan besides /prog/ Thinkpads are wonderful machines with lots of upgrade options. A T61 with an SSD and ram upgrade is quite usable for most everything except high quality video playback .Performance on win10 is ram dependent but with i3 and debian installed ram usage at idle is so so so low (sub gig)
I watch a lot of video so streaming + local 1080p+ (or even 4K) playback is a must for me at high bitrates. What's the oldest Thinkpad device that can handle that I wonder?
Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)
#692010 Dell latitude. Runs just as well as it did when I first got it. Mind you it looks rough around the edges.
2008 Latitude here, free from my university's surplus. It still runs the Ubuntu flavor of the month just fine.
Re: Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)
#702011 Lenovo Thinkpad X220 daily user here. Really nice machine really for my needs, running the latest Debian smoothly. I do have a spare ready to take over if needed. Old hardware could always die very suddenly. It's a frugal solution, both cheaper and more ecological than buying new.
i don't like to rep the x220s much because i don't want their prices to go up in ebay/craigslist/etc... but it would be nice if we had good aftermarket hardware support, so maybe this is a fine time to rep. my x220 is a delightful experience. awesome mechanical keyboard and (with SSD & 16gb ram) pretty snappy on all the websites i need it for. perfect for all kinds of non-javascript coding, and handles webpack accept…
The keyboard isn’t mechanical (in the same way that a Cherry MX switch would be) but they are absolutely wonderful for a laptop keyboard.