Oldest Viable Laptop (2017)

2011 Lenovo Thinkpad X220 daily user here. Really nice machine really for my needs, running the latest Debian smoothly.<p>I do have a spare ready to take over if needed. Old hardware could always die very suddenly. It&#x27;s a frugal solution, both cheaper and more ecological than buying new.

Most 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.

I don&#x27;t really understand how we&#x27;ve all been shocked by this. From <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.maketecheasier.com&#x2F;why-cpu-clock-speed-isnt-increasing&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.maketecheasier.com&#x2F;why-cpu-clock-speed-isnt-incr...</a>:<p>&gt; &quot;Thanks to the limitations of physics and the current transistor material designs, increasing clock speed is not currently the best way to increase computational power.&quot;<p>In around 2006, the CPU industry became a commodity industry &amp; innovation has since come in the form of Instruction Level Parallelism (ILP) rather than the engineering of faster CPUs. That shift is responsible for your 10+ year old laptop still being viable.

My daily driver is mid-2012 pre-retina MBP. It&#x27;s entirely adequate. I fear the day it dies because there are no more non-glossy MBPs, and I&#x27;m either going to have to make the choice to give up a matte display or give up macOS.<p>It did recently go down and I pulled out a 2008 MBP. Mostly adequate, lag does start to show, though. My guess is that it&#x27;s an issue of constrained memory (max 4GB?) as much as processor. Tops out at El Capitan, though, so it won&#x27;t be viable too much longer. Linux seems to be the slow lane of the upgrade treadmill.

&#x2F;tpg&#x2F; on &#x2F;g&#x2F; is probably my favorite aspect of 4chan besides &#x2F;prog&#x2F;<p>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)

Middle management at my $FORTUNE_500 was the opposite, and I&#x27;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&#x27;t get mine until IT was outsourced and the outsourced guys couldn&#x27;t figure out how to buy the right SODIMMs for my ancient lappy to get it to 16gb.

My Vaio FE11s from 2006 also still works well. I&#x27;m not really surprised. Especially when you do text based stuff. During the time I wrote my MSc thesis (in 2005) in LaTeX, I used a very old Toshiba Satellite (it looked like this Toshiba Satellite Pro 420 from 1996 [0]). It had a 2GB hard drive so I had to carefully select the software packages that Slackware wanted to install. But it worked a I wrote parts of my thesis on it (blackbox window manager, nedit as editor iirc), I probably still could.<p>But it&#x27;s getting harder and harder to find 32 bit images. I like Ubuntu Mate 18.04 32 bit though, I recently installed it on my Eee 1000he (2009, Intel Atom CPU) for my son. I could even stream Netflix in Firefox. Not smoothly though. I wanted to fit it with an SSD... but I believe there are no PATA SSD drives :) (at least not in my possession currently.) Not sure if it would make a difference also given the speed op PATA.<p>[0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.computinghistory.org.uk&#x2F;det&#x2F;23468&#x2F;Toshiba-Satellite-Pro-420-CDS-810&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.computinghistory.org.uk&#x2F;det&#x2F;23468&#x2F;Toshiba-Satelli...</a>

&gt; Either laptop improvements are well into diminishing returns, or progress in hardware has stagnated, or both.<p>Sort of. The part about diminishing returns is arguably true, but hardware didn&#x27;t stagnated.<p>What happened is that _software_ stopped bloating and inflating like a balloon, as was the norm through the &#x27;80s, &#x27;90s and early &#x27;00s.<p>When a Microsoft OS requires _less_ resources than it&#x27;s predecessors (like early Win7 compared to early Vista), you know upgrade cycles will be much longer than before.<p>Unless you&#x27;re handling high definition video or playing AAA games, of course. But for any other &quot;mundane&quot; task, the only reason to upgrade from a 5 or 6 years old machine would be an un-repairable hardware malfunction.

I bet if somebody held a gun to my head, and I was at least allowed to dial in via modem to a *nix server with node.js on it - I could probably do my current job, to a certain bare-bones level...<p>...using my TRS-80 Model 100.<p>Don&#x27;t get me wrong - it would be a nightmare and no fun, and some things just wouldn&#x27;t be possible.<p>Though that&#x27;s definitely not what the author had in mind...

I have a very old Thinkpad X40 convertible which I use occasionally as pretty much a dumb terminal. It runs the latest i386 version of xubuntu. CPU is a single core Pentium M something, 1.5GB of RAM, 40GB hard drive.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thinkwiki.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Category:X40" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thinkwiki.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Category:X40</a><p>It works totally fine for SSH sessions and a web browser interface to not-very-complicated intranet tools accessed via a VPN, such as ticketing system, network monitoring software, etc.<p>If I want to leave a monitoring display of something running, I fullscreen it in a browser, rotate the thing into its tablet mode and prop it up against something on my desk.

For reference, a 2007 era Apple laptop would be one of these:<p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;everymac.com&#x2F;systems&#x2F;apple&#x2F;macbook_pro&#x2F;specs&#x2F;macbook-pro-core-2-duo-2.4-15-santa-rosa-specs.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;everymac.com&#x2F;systems&#x2F;apple&#x2F;macbook_pro&#x2F;specs&#x2F;macbook...</a><p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;everymac.com&#x2F;systems&#x2F;apple&#x2F;macbook&#x2F;specs&#x2F;macbook-core-2-duo-2.16-white-13-mid-2007-specs.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;everymac.com&#x2F;systems&#x2F;apple&#x2F;macbook&#x2F;specs&#x2F;macbook-cor...</a><p>And you&#x27;d be able to run up to 10.11 (El Capitan) on the Pro or 10.7 (Lion) on the MacBook.

I found the most interesting part at the bottom where he said he got his MacBook back and is still using his old 2007 ThinkPad more than the Mac now.

Heh, there are quite a few people on &#x2F;r&#x2F;thinkpad who thinks &quot;something about this machine that causes me to favor it&quot; -- aye, there is, quite a lot in fact. And yes, even the X61 is usable today and the Sandy Bridge based X220&#x2F;T420&#x2F;T420s being the last factory machines with the classic keyboard have something of a cult following. As I mentioned many a times before here, from Sandy Bridge to Kaby Lake IPC have only grown 20% and while power efficiency has grown significantly it&#x27;s been negated by switching to 15W CPUs instead of 35W so it&#x27;s no wonder the performance is vaguely similar. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cpu.userbenchmark.com&#x2F;Compare&#x2F;Intel-Core-i5-2520M-vs-Intel-Core-i5-7200U&#x2F;m29vsm153577" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cpu.userbenchmark.com&#x2F;Compare&#x2F;Intel-Core-i5-2520M-vs...</a> Edit: and as a comment below notes, since ThinkPads are typically bought in fleets, any ThinkPad older than three years is typically very cheap on eBay. Buying cheap old ThinkPads instead of similarly priced new laptops at retail outlets is one of those &quot;lifehacks&quot; I suppose. Their ease of maintenance and parts availability combined with the stalled CPU speed growth makes this a very viable strategy.<p>The best ThinkPad of course is the 25th Anniversary Edition having 2017 hardware with the classic keyboard. That&#x27;s what I am typing on right now. The next best is a hackfest: take a T430s with an i7 iGPU, for some demented reason Lenovo put a Thunderbolt 1 controller in those (also the S430 and then the next ThinkPad with Thunderbolt is the P50 w&#x2F; TB3 four years later). Now comes the hacking: add the classic keyboard and also the high quality full HD screen from the T440s using a Chinese converter kit -- the 30 series used LVDS, the panel uses eDP so you need a converter. I have a T420s with that hack. Thunderbolt 1 is obviously slower than Thunderbolt 3 but still, any TB3 eGPU enclosure will work. As the T430s can have two 2.5&quot; SSDs and an mSATA SSD, you can add quite an amount of solid storage to this -- much more than the TP25, the TP25 maxes out at 2.5TB currently, while the T430s can do 9TB. The NVMe disks are of course faster in the TP25 (even though one is x2 the other is x1) but the feeling in everyday tasks is not going to be vastly different -- the big jump is in HDD to SSD. You are also limited to 16GB RAM vs the 32GB RAM in the TP25. And the CPUs are even closer: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cpu.userbenchmark.com&#x2F;Compare&#x2F;Intel-Core-i7-3520M-vs-Intel-Core-i7-7500U&#x2F;m50vsm171274" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cpu.userbenchmark.com&#x2F;Compare&#x2F;Intel-Core-i7-3520M-vs...</a> Your battery life won&#x27;t be awesome, alas.

I&#x27;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.

Not sure it&#x27;s really true that a 1997 laptop would not have been OK for 2007. I nursed a PowerBook G3 &quot;Pismo&quot; along until at least 2007. It had Rage 128 graphics and 1024x768 display just like this ThinkPad. Yes it had an upgraded G4 CPU and replacement batteries, but the X60 on which I am typing this message has a $$$ SSD in it, too.

As I mentioned in a previous thread [0], I upgraded an old X61 with a custom mainboard produced by a group of enthusiasts in China 1.5 years ago and never looked back.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18273305" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18273305</a>

A related question that is also interesting:<p>What is the oldest laptop that can run an up-to-date, internet connected OS (i.e a museum device with the same OS from 1991 doesn&#x27;t count). It doesn&#x27;t have to have a fancy desktop, but it does have to support connectivity to the internet, and run all the latest security patches and updates.<p>This is different than the article because optimizing productivity isn&#x27;t an objective, just how long the device can be updated before it becomes impossible to do so anymore, analogous to vintage car maintenance.

A majority of the bottle necks I&#x27;ve encountered have been ram. Maybe battery life secondarily. This is from a performance perspective. For software development work flow. Not trying to run the entire environment on my laptop. Barring of course something like constant video encoding or high cpu usage. Past that we&#x27;re seeing improvements in weight, and display.<p>I&#x27;ve used thinkpads for a while. Starting off with a T430. With a quad core, and 16gb of ram and three SSDs. The two pain points were the display and weight.<p>I upgraded to a T440s, which fixed the screen and weight. But the ram became a deficit (12GB max). I worked around this by RDPing into a dedicated server I colocated. This offered a beefier desktop on demand (32GB ram + hexa core). But this also faltered because of poor internet connection outside of my home generally. The thin client works very well, as long as you have good internet. But good internet is very difficult to find.<p>I upgraded to an A485, most recent ryzen. It clocked in around 1200 after upgrades. All my older thinkpads were around 200 total. It&#x27;s not worth it.<p>It&#x27;s not just the core components. The dock was an extra 200. I picked up older thinkpad docks and carried the same model for several generations. I got them used I think for under 50. I had one at every junction of my house. Dock to the media center, desk, bedroom, etc.<p>From what I&#x27;ve seen the next thinkpad line is going to be even less upgradeble. Which is a real shame. That feature really extended the life of any business model.

I have my ~2008 T61 as my pfsense router now. I was using it until about 2-3 years ago, but I felt it was barely usable anymore. I think anything with a Core 2 duo is past its useful life. Anything just slightly newer with Nehalem? I think would still be usable today.

This is the machine journalists (going up against state sponsored entities with unlimited money and resources) use. It&#x27;s because it&#x27;s the last machine where the intel chip doesn&#x27;t have that remote upgrade feature put into them since.

Just a few months ago I replaced nearly the same laptop (Thinkpad x61 in my case, with SSD and 4GB RAM upgrades).<p>It has served me well for 6 years (I bought it secondhand), but it started to definitely show its age.<p>It started to have difficulties playing youtube videos and the like, these consuming a lot of CPU, and consequently battery life started to drop to below 2 hours (plus the aging battery didn&#x27;t helped), and fan noise started to get somewhat annoying. It also had some scars like marks on the screen or partially broken keys (I&#x27;ve not necessarily treated it well, compressing it in bags or having dropped it on more than one occasions).<p>It is still usable, and I will convert it for other uses (mpd server probably). But it was time to replace it with a newer laptop, the new one is a secondhand Thinkpad x250, and it&#x27;s definitely an improvement, quiet, more powerful, 6 to 8 hours autonomy. I hope it will last about as long as the x61 that served me so well.

I see making computer work as long as possible an environmental cause. It took awhile, but I got my company to switch from a ridiculous 2 year cycle to a 6 year and in some cases longer cycle.. At first the higher ups were very skeptical about it. It took a lot of convincing, but we got approval to try it and everyone is still as productive as ever.<p>Mind you, when I purchase, I try to &quot;future proof&quot; them as best we can. The last batch we bought for our general office users, where i5&#x27;s with 16GB ram and a 512GB SSD. For our devs, I generally set them up with a super-fast ultra-portable(think mac air or dell xps13) as most of their heavy lifting is off-loaded to our private cloud. And so far everyone report very high satisfaction with the setups provided.

2010 thinkpad x201 user here. Archlinux + XFCE4 setup. Everything works pretty smooth. Sometimes i am using software like Blender3D that requires decent hardware. Everyting works fine as a hobbyist.<p>As long as it does not fall and break apart, it is gonna work forever. But hey, it is thinkpad so...

Battery life is necessary to do my job, and is pretty much the only reason I get new hardware now.

It&#x27;s wondrous to me how viable an old laptop can be. My daily driver is a &quot;Ship of Theseus&quot; Dell D630 from 2008 and it&#x27;s perfectly usable for the sysadmin work I do. The lack of USB 3.0 is maddening, but that aside it&#x27;s fine for my day-to-day document prep and admin, scripting, mail, and web browsing. Installing an SSD added years to the machine&#x27;s life. I&#x27;m on my third keyboard and second lid (hinge failure) but both of those are, arguably, wear items. &gt;smile&lt;<p>(I&#x27;ve had a brand new Latitude sitting unused for over a year now. I just can&#x27;t get excited about getting used to a new keyboard or rebuilding my entire software environment on a new machine.)

I SSH into VMs and write email all day. I could get by with a text web browser at a slight loss of productivity during the steep part of the learning curve.<p>I could do my job on a laptop from the 90s if I really wanted to. I&#x27;m sure I&#x27;m not the only one.

Still rocking T60p, with the NMB keyboard. If you haven&#x27;t touched an NMB Thinkpad keyboard, you haven&#x27;t actually used a proper Thinkpad.<p>One thing I found absolutely necessary to make my machine usable in 2019 was upgrading all the specs to the max.

2007 doesn&#x27;t seem that old. I&#x27;ve got a desktop I built in 1999 that I continue to actively use. The only upgrades its ever gotten was a cable tuner card, fuck knows how long ago, a second hard drive and some extra RAM around 2007 or so. It runs ubuntu server now, but for a long time i had a full desktop running on it. Xorg is still installed if I really need a desktop environment for some reason.<p>It would take a long time to do things, but there&#x27;s no reason i can&#x27;t do pretty much anything I do on my current laptop on there.

I&#x27;m using an i7, mid-2010 17&quot; MacBook Pro at work, its been upgraded to 16Gb of RAM and an SSD installed but otherwise its stock and works great.<p>I am a software-programmer and use ColdFusion builder, SQL (Azure Data Studio), and various other tools like TextWrangler, RDP, Firefox, Chrome, etc. The only complaint I have is that it won&#x27;t run Mojave so no &quot;Dark-mode&quot; but that&#x27;s ok--having used this laptop for a year now, if I can squeeze another year out of it I&#x27;ll probably qualify to get a more recent model.

I&#x27;m genuinely surprised it doesn&#x27;t have a touchpad. I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;ve ever seen a laptop without one, and I used laptops back in the early&#x2F;mid 90&#x27;s.

With meaningful innovation slowing down, I expect older laptops will become increasingly viable.

T430 owner here. Even if it&#x27;s a Ivy Bridge CPU, the machine works amazingly well. I love it.<p>In maintenance terms It&#x27;s almost a desktop. I have replaced the dual core cpu for a quad core, double the RAM, switch the hdd for an SSD, get a better battery, remove the CD drive for a 2nd caddy, added a 5GHz wi-fi card, and still have the possibility to upgrade to a IPS Panel, backlight keyboard and other gimmicks. All with a phillips screwdriver, and official lenovo guide and my thumbs.<p>And don&#x27;t make me start talking about linux support, it&#x27;s basically MacOS plug and play (in Windows you have to install a Lenovo App for the drivers).<p>With all the upgrades I guess you can make the case, that will all that money, I could buy a better laptop. But I don&#x27;t know, there is something charming about using the same machine for a long time, and have little improvements over time, with little to no downtime and re-learning workflows.<p>Makes me sad, that when the time comes to replace the machine, I will not be able to repair it or upgrade as much.

I just got a refurbished Thinkpad x230 and it work great with an ubuntu 18.04 install. It has 16GB of ram, a 512GB ssd and a Intel Core i5-3320M CPU @ 2.60GHz x 4 and cost $350 on newegg.<p>The difference between this machine and a $1500 latest model machine strikes me as marginal and it&#x27;s silly to drop four times as much money for something that is marginally faster.

Last year during Christmas I visited my mother for a day and she still uses my MacBook Pro from early 2008. It doesn&#x27;t hold much of a charge anymore (it&#x27;s on it&#x27;s 2nd replacement battery) but it works delightfully for web browsing, terminal use and I&#x27;m sure that I could do most of my daily SRE work on it.

This laptop is an Asus dual core from 2009, initially released with Windows 7, currently running Windows 10, maxed out to 8GB and an 1 TB SSD.<p>Still quite fit to run VS, Eclipse, Android Studio.<p>Only issue that the fan has already seen better days.<p>No wonder that PC makers cannot sell enough machines nowadays to keep investors happy.

I do my gaming on a Desktop from 2011. It&#x27;s a Core i5 with 12 GB of Ram (one bay is dead) and a Nvidia GTX 960 card.<p>I&#x27;m running Linux and Proton&#x2F;Steamplay, and play a few AAA games from 2016. I&#x27;m not really confident that my framerate would improve much if I bought a new PC.

Good ol&#x27; Thinkpads. I have a T410 running Linux that is honestly fine for most of the work that I do day to day. If the screen was better I honestly couldn&#x27;t come up with many reasons to get anything else. The keyboard alone makes it worth it.<p>In light of apple becoming less and less of a viable option, I have been wondering if we are going to start seeing a wave of these older machines come back into play. There&#x27;s already a pretty healthy mod market out there, maybe our needs are so niche that we need to build our setups out ourselves? These older Thinkpads are modular enough that it&#x27;s certainly possible. The nerd in me is excited about the possibilities. The pragmatist is a wee bit terrified. :)

I have the x61s. Up until about 3 years ago I still used it quite a bit. It was always my travel companion too. Mostly I just don&#x27;t use computers at home much, otherwise I&#x27;d probably have used it more.<p>It&#x27;s a bit fragile now, dropping it a few times over 7 years can do that. The dual core core 2 duo and 4GB of RAM, and 9 Cell (160GB 7200RPM drive) battery meant that it was good enough for just most things for a very long time.<p>Of the computers I&#x27;ve had, it rivals the 2015 MBP Retina with being a favorite of all time. I&#x27;d possibly give it a slight edge over the MBP due to size and keyboard.<p>It was also nicer than the later X2xx series, IMO, which is why I went with macbooks later.

Still running a Thinkpad x230t here. Outside the screen resolution while not docked, it has been great! It even survived a hard tumble down a flight of stairs 3 yrs ago; the only damage was a small gap along the seam of the external battery.

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&#x27;ve had some additional RAM laying around and a new SSD (totaling 8&#x2F;128) and the thing flies, he is very satisfied. For the money I don&#x27;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.

My first development laptop was an 1984 IBM model. It&#x27;s screen was black-n-white only, and it weighed like a bag of bricks. However, I wrote an amazing amount of Borland C++ on the road with that beast. (rest-in-peace)

I have a laptop which is 6 years old (not a thinkpad) which I was on the verge of tossing because I needed a new keyboard for it. Except for the broken keyboard, it&#x27;s still a great machine, but the unavailability of parts was a problem.<p>Luckily I was able to find one and had it shipped from China. 10 minutes later it&#x27;s as good as new. I found others on ebay, but they weren&#x27;t actually available any more.<p>I had a similar experience recently for a cellphone, but instead of hardware it was software. I can&#x27;t get security updates for it anymore. Except for that, it&#x27;s still a great phone.

My 8 year old Samsung Series 9 Ultraportable. I still far prefer it to my much newer ASUS. Best laptop I&#x27;ve ever owned. (essentially a macbook pro spec machine... and beautifully designed)<p>It&#x27;d be my regular travel lappy if I could bother getting a new battery for it. Still great to code on, and the screen is far far better than the ASUS. Lighter too. (although no discrete graphics)<p>But battery life is a killer. ASUS lasts up to ten hours, and the Samsung barely does 2 hours now. With a power point, that&#x27;s not an issue, but it&#x27;s nice to have something with a bit more go.

I&#x27;ve been using a mid-2010 Mac book Pro as my main laptop. Since 2010, the changes I&#x27;ve made are to bump up the RAM from 4GB to 8GB (its max), and replace the power brick. The battery now only lasts for about half an hour, so that needs replacement as well. There are also some big bad black dead spots on the display.<p>In terms of speed and performance, I can&#x27;t complain too much, at least for my use.<p>I think we&#x27;ve hit a point where peripherals and batteries wear out sooner than the performance slowdown hits us.

Maybe the failure of moore&#x27;s law will finally make manufacturers diversify in form and features. It&#x27;d be nice to be able to buy a laptop with a 4:3 screen and a clitmouse.

And here I am using a HP elitebook 8440w from 2010-2011 as my main computer here .__. Though laggy sometimes, I use it daily with an avd + vscode without many issues.

Gotta love my 2.5kg W520. Once I get the spare dosh to replace the ram and maybe HD, it&#x27;ll be good for another 4 years, and I got it secondhand in pristine condition. My old X60, which was second hand, got used 3-4 years, and got resold, yet again! These machines aren&#x27;t beasts, they&#x27;re leviathans before which apples cower to their core, shedding their to-some-shiny, -seductive red skin.

I&#x27;m simply not interested in where laptops are going. I&#x27;m a healthy adult male, so a few hundred grams of weight is not an issue. I also find thin laptops very uncomfortable to use in certain positions where you balance it against your body.<p>I really should buy a &#x27;clunky&#x27;, &#x27;heavy&#x27; laptop before they all disappear and all that&#x27;s left are wafer thin machines with soldered-on everything.

I use a 2012 Dell XPS 15 daily. I got it as a warranty replacement when my XPS 14 broke. I&#x27;ve given it an SSD and swapped a new battery once. Otherwise it does everything I ask of it except having more than 2 hours of battery life. I&#x27;ve wanted to buy something lighter (the XPS is 5+ pounds) for years but I can&#x27;t justify it when the 7 year old laptop still works fine.

Huge fan of Geoff&#x27;s post. His X62 post is what inspired to build my own. Though we should probably put a 2017 year stamp on the title.

I&#x27;ve kept a 2008 MBP running by upgrading the RAM and putting in an SSD. But I&#x27;d never buy another one since (at least according to Apple&#x27;s website [1]) the last upgradable model was released in 2012.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.apple.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;HT201165" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.apple.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;HT201165</a>

My 5 year old MBP is still awesome .... So much so that I feel bad I bought the latest MBP. It&#x27;s not &quot;much&quot; better.<p>I often recommend people buy a ten year old full-frame dSLR. Quality photos are more dependant on the photographer and maybe the glass... Megapixels aren&#x27;t that important with a full frame sensor made in the last 15 years...

I have my parents (in their early 70&#x27;s) using a 2008 MBP 15&quot;. Mostly for importing and organizing photos, email, and a bit of web stuff. They upgraded it to El Capitan - the latest MacOS it would take - without any difficulties. They&#x27;ll likely use it for another couple of years until I donate my 2015 13&quot; MBP to them.

I used an old SGI Fuel (700Mhz, 2GB Ram) as my daily driver @ work until 2013. I would rdesktop to use heavy websites, but other than that it rocked.<p>Stopped using it because I graduated and I didn’t want to pay the electricity bill or keep a jet engine running at night (light sleeper)<p>If anyone here had successfully converted an SGI to a fanless SSD unit, let me know!

I have a ~2003 iBook still going strong.

I use that same Thinkpad X61s as my personal laptop. Got one used for $100 and added a big drive and it&#x27;s good-to-go for linux work. The keyboard&#x27;s great and I actually like the 4x3 display. Best thing, if anything happens to it, it&#x27;s a _cheap_ laptop, so not so bad.

&gt; I’m not sure if I’ll stick with it, but there’s something about this machine that causes me to favor it.<p>The keyboard.

+1 on a Thinkpad. I have a T420s that&#x27;s almost a decade old now, and it still works pretty well (the beast still has a drive bay!). I swapped that out for a SSD that&#x27;s configured to be the main boot drive few years ago. I think it&#x27;ll last at least another 5 years.

At work we get new corporate PCs every few years and I&#x27;ve rejected the offer twice now because the build quality of my Elitebook 8560w is better than the modern alternatives. I put in an SSD and lots of RAM so now I don&#x27;t want to deal with the hassle of a new one.

I daily a 2010 Lenovo T420s. Replaced the disc drive with a solid-state drive and the CD drive with an auxiliary battery pack. Maxed out RAM. Runs Debian 9.x with dwm.<p>Perfectly adequate for software development. On the odd occasion I need more, I shell into a virtual private server.

&gt; Ubuntu 16.04 doesn’t have a built-in dictionary or thesaurus<p>What OS has build-in dictionary? There is no need to preinstall all the programs. Even if it had one it would be just one more thing to remove and install another dict (everyone has different needs).

I have a 2008 MB (first of the unibody models) and it would be OK if not for hardware no longer being supported by the newer versions of macOS. This means I am unable to install .NET Core 2.0 or some of the newer Node versions which is a shame.

I have replaced the battery and the HDD by an SSD in two old thinkpads, and they work very well. In particular, they have a nice key layout and type a lot better than my 1600 dollar Dell XPS, which is more important to me than a full HD screen.

I frickin&#x27; love my 2010 ThinkPad T510. It was my workhorse for about eight years, until I got a desktop PC to use as a daily driver. The ThinkPad is still a secondary machine, and it runs NetBSD now.

Not a daily driver, but still use my Dell XPS from 2011 and it holds up relatively well. Planning on putting in an SSD and replacing the thermal paste to give it some extra life.

I got rid of my 2006 MacBook pro Core 2 Duo in late 2012 because Apple was dropping support for it in future MacOS versions. I kept my replacement longer with much less issues.

Nothing quite illustrates the death of Moore’s law quite like this does. I brought out an old thinkpad for a similar reason and was able to do everything I needed to do.

One killer feature that recently appeared in notebooks is a Thunderbolt 3 port for eGPUs. They have the potential to lengthen the lifetime of the notebook.

Simiarly, I still have a 2009 Macbook Pro laying around that I sometimes use and it&#x27;s just fine. I mean, it&#x27;s not <i>fast</i> but it&#x27;s fine.

An related question that is also interesting:<p>What is the oldest laptop that you can install an run a recent open source OS on. It doesn&#x27;t have to ha e a fancy desktop

As a former ThinkPad owner, I knew ThinkPads came with those red TrackPoints, but I didn&#x27;t know you could get them <i>without</i> track pads.

My wife uses my old ThinkPad X60 from 2007 from day to day, for office work, web browsing, email, video. No problems at all with Debian stable.

2010 thinkpad t410s, alas the screen hinges have broken so I don&#x27;t take it on the road as much as I&#x27;d like.<p>Works fine with ubuntu 1604

As far as I have anything that could be called daily work laptop it is ThinkPad X200s with maxed-out RAM and cheap SSD.

2010 Dell latitude. Runs just as well as it did when I first got it. Mind you it looks rough around the edges.

funny thing. i downgraded to an iphone se this past weekend to remedy the fatigue of carrying the large-in-comparison iPhone XS. It is not only perfectly functional for my daily needs, but it is also easier to use thanks to TouchID!

X220 still is my small collection of computers, could easily use it daily still

I still use an ASUS A6000 from 2006.

Hey, did anyone hear about Spectre?