alt Hacker NewsA 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That said, I maintain a G4 Cube running an outdated OS to play Sim City and Sim Tower.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
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It doesn’t have to be 17 years old though. I think the point he’s making is that it’s still solving problems for him. I have one that’s 12 years old. It just does what I need to. Parts are easily replaceable. I keep doing the cost/benefit of upgrading but I just don’t need it.
This is the asterisk that always stands out to me with the raving posts about how great people's dinosaur Thinkpads are.
Yes, if I don't have to keep multiple browser windows, video calls, Slack, and whathaveyou open, then I too can get by with an ancient Thinkpad. If it is enough for you, then all the power to you. I am sincerely supportive of the fact that you can stick it to today's consumerist, disposable tech industry.
Here I am on my T480s with 40 GB memory (8 is soldered) and the highest tier CPU for the Thinkpad gen (apparently these are soldered on too), and it's a drag. I'm trying to scrape by until I can start thinking about saving up for a new Framework.
> But it still performs like dogshit for today's applications
That says more about how unoptimized are today's applications than the capabilities of the machine
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 works fine for everything except GPU and fitting inside many backpacks.
With ThinkPads of this era, you want to get a high-spec variant of the model (e.g., top-res IPS display), and then make the following upgrades:
* SSD
* run Linux
* run uBlock Origin (and block most of the third-party surveillance, which hurts performance) (JS runs fine, so long as you're not running multiple dueling adtech slimeballs' intimate mouse trackers)
* max out the RAM (you don't need that much for Linux, unless you're using an exceptionally bloated desktop option, but it's cheap, and you can use it to keep filesystems like ~/.cache off your SSD )
* (optional) replace the CPU with a more optimal one for power draw or heat, or maybe for compute (these are socketed in most models)
* (optional, not for the faint of heart) install Coreboot, and then you have more WiFi upgrade options