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Revitalizing an Aging Notebook On the Cheap
jcatcw writes "Brian Nadel's ThinkPad R50 just hit its fifth birthday, and the years haven't been kind to it. When it was new, the notebook was reliable and fast. Now it's slow and prone to annoying shutdowns. Is it a good investment to revamp a notebook that's worth about $350? It sure is, because this old notebook will get a new lease on life for about $125 — a bargain, considering what it could cost to replace." On the other hand, upgrading RAM, keyboard and hard drive don't get you a smaller (netbook-style) computer, a new battery, or the transflective screen on the Toshiba linked above.
A 5-year-old notebook is worth $350? I don't think so. Hard for me to pay much attention to the rest of any article that begins that far off base...
A-Bomb
With a few exceptions, battery life just sucks with an aging laptop. and replacement batteries are either used up themselves, insanely expensive, or impossible to find.
Old computers suck, get an EEE PC
\thread
I also heard if you tie hundreds of horses together your cart may run as fast as a Ferrari (and it'd be cheaper too)! Oats cost nothing compared to the price of gas these days...
Amen. Not to mention that the plastic casing is almost certainly weaker than a new laptop, making it more susceptible to damage. Just pay the $1099 and get a new MacBook. You'll get the latest in WiFi and Bluetooth capabilities, a beautiful TFT screen, a fast dual-core processor, plenty of RAM, a battery that's new, battery life that his 5 yr old laptop could only dream about when it was new, a massive hard disk, a multi-touch touchpad (cue nipple-warriors), and a better operating system. All in all, a pretty good deal.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
So he added some memory and doubled his hard drive size (I don't really count replacing the keyboard as an "upgrade"). He made no mention of the battery, which any 5 year old laptop will need a new one of. That in itself will be about 50-75% of his $125 upgrade budget.
This guy's the limit!
No mention of a new battery - I know my battery is useless after less than 4 years, I only get 5 mins now. At over $100, though, it's not worth it to me to replace. I'm always near a power supply. Add the $125 he spent, plus $125 for a battery, & you're only $150 away from a new Dell. Just sayin'...
I am a cheapskate that also owns a thinkpad R-series (an R32, to be more specific). I just dropped about $60-70 in parts (more when you include shipping) to replace a crack in the LCD bezel.
I almost gave up on it, and replaced it with a new unit, until I realized just how well my 7-year-old thinkpad still runs. I've seen my colleagues replace numerous dell, apple, and HP laptops in this time. This notebook has been in 4 countries, 3 provinces, and over a dozen US states with me. Its on its third battery, but thats not bad for its age. I bought it when I was finishing my 4-year degree, and its still with me now, over halfway into my PhD.
And when I realized that I would spend over $1,000 to get a new thinkpad with the options I wanted, I realized that my repair was a great investment. And of course the IBM (lenovo) website has all the documents you need to completely disassemble your laptop (and put it back together, too).
Unless you have extra money - and I'm guessing you don't, since you bought an R-series - you would be wise to put some money into refurbishing your laptop. You'll be glad you did.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
The best investment you can make is to give that laptop to some enterprising person and tell them to make a blog or site and give you the a percentage of the profits.
You might even be better of simply donating the laptop to charity and deducting the donation from your taxes.
If you really need it for some reason or cannot possibly afford something newer, consider putting Xubuntu, Puppy, or some other lightweight OS on there.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
I've been working on and in PC's for years and have never seen THAT bad a clog. Big dust bunnies are the worst I've seen...
Where the hell did this laptop go? It looks like it sucked up a ferret (look at the page 5 gallery).
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9096720&pageNumber=5
Good.. Bad.. I'm the guy with the gun.
Was this guy living with a pack of dogs and using his fan guard as a lint filter? That before picture is bad...
Windows tends to get bogged down with crap if not reinstalled every couple years or so. Of course there's always Ubuntu.
I think the question is interesting, but really, to get an old laptop working again, you must still walk around with something that looks and feels aged, since the casing is torn, the monitor is far from what it used to be (LCD and TFT quality wears out after some time) and the keyboard is probably not what it used to be either.
Why not just spend $500 on a new computer, such as the Asus Eee or MSI Wind? You're definitely getting more performance out of it, plus the benefits of WiFi, Bluetooth, etc.
Full Tilt
I have a 6 year old Dell C840, 2.2 Ghz P4M, 1GB RAM, nVidia graphics, built-in wireless, 1600x1200 screen. It's still going strong and I still use it as my primary rig when doing remote consulting jobs.
Sure it's big and bulky compared to modern comps but it's got a damn nice screen and enough horsepower to run VMware and everything else I need.
The only problem is the battery is shot to hell and can only hold a charge for maybe 10 minutes. I normally have somewhere to plug in so I haven't bothered replacing it.
The ratio of people to cake is too big
Refurbishment makes sense for higher quality notebooks. My grab and go travel notebook is a loaded out (max memory, 80 gig HD) nearly 10 year old Compaq M300, it weighs in at 3.3 pounds has a magnesium case, and quality construction. The P3-500 is fast enough to browse the web, play youtube videos, and all that other basic stuff. Best yet I only have about $300 invested in it, so if it breaks I am not out much. Sure I could spend $1500 on a similared sized high quality replacement, but do I really need all those extra wasted clock cycles. And if I did spend $1500 on it, would I treat it like this grab and go, toss it around, leave it in the open in motel rooms while I am away, etc.
Three reasons to upgrade, rather than replacement:
1. It could be cheaper. He was talking about a hard drive and memory here, both of which can offer a slight boost in functionality, which is all that some people need.
2. It may be easier. If you're only talking about upgrading the RAM, then you get to bypass the joys of installing software and reconfiguring your working environment.
3. You may have trouble getting the features you need. Have an old printer that you don't want to replace? Need a serial port on the road, but don't want to carry an adapter?
4. It just may be more environmentally friendly. It takes energy to manufacture goods. It takes time and energy to dispose of hazardous waste.
Upgrading doesn't always makes sense. But sometimes it does make sense. So why criticize people who take that less travelled path?
I spent a couple years reviving old Dell Inspiron P2&3's, and I have to say that this OS has been the greatest thing since sliced bread. Extremely fast, lightweight, well supported with drivers, it has it all. Now with Wine 1.0 being released there's very little argument not to try this Linux brew. If you're not into Linux might I suggest grabbing your XP key with Jellybean and installing TinyXP or a similar stripped down version. Often you can get everything you need out of these versions save a few enterprise or development perks.
Last, but not least, spending the money on a really fast USB thumb drive and throwing your swap/page file onto the drive can give a real performance boost. I will most likely get flamed for this suggestion, however in my experience it works.
Where genius and insanity become confused true wisdom is found
Go look on ebay before you say that.
Backup essential data, throw down stairs, claim on home insurance accidental damage policy, pay excess, get new laptop.
Works for me.
I only buy pepper spray that's been tested on anti-vivisectionists.
Been there, done that.
Your cart goes as fast as the fastest horse can run, minus a bit since he's now dragging the cart AND the other horses.
The vet bills to fix the broken legs of the horses that are slower outweighs the cost savings. RoHS prevents the simple solution to a broken leg.
Like Larry the Cable Guy says: I heard the right thing to do when your horse breaks its leg is to shoot it. So I did. Now I have a horse with a broken leg and a gunshot wound.
My old laptop (Compaq Evo N610c) runs like cold molasses with XP, but with a 2.6 kernel, a nice new hard drive, and Firefox 3, it runs just great.
You can get a modern, dual-core laptop that will run XP or Linux like a dream for under $500 these days. It's hardly worth dropping money on an older one.
Set it aside and install Linux on it and use it for a download, firewall, torrent, web, development, java, gcc, proxy, cvs, - whatever - server. A working computer you can hack around on is always worth something.
http://www.schleppingsquid.net/DJSath/thinkpad01.jpg
http://www.schleppingsquid.net/DJSath/thinkpad02.jpg
No longer runs Gentoo...but now it rocks DSL!
I have a 6 year old Dell Insp 8100.(1 gig p3, 512 meg ram, radeon 7500 1600x1200 display).
It's served me well over the years and it still does most anything I need (web, email, videos). I
LOVE the high resolution display and most of the laptops I see for under 750 have lesser displays. Dell warranty replaced the hindges about 3 years ago when the thing "blew up." Today, the hindges are as floppy as a 5.25in floppy.
Is there a way to replace the hindges for cheap instead of buying a new laptop to solve this problem?
Thanks,
Grump
Is it true that more people vote for the winner of American Idol, than vote for the president? -Ali G.
My 'outdated piece of shit' is doing just great and I use it every day. The new battery lasts even longer than the original and the tickless 2.6 kernel doesn't hurt, either.
I wonder how did the laptop speed got slower with the years...
Sure, you can drop some money on a hard drive and RAM. That is if the notebook will take them. You may well run into memory compatibility problems or a hard drive size limit in the bios. Finding the right kind of RAM and drive may even mean having to spend big depending on where you live.
Much better to spend the money on a new machine. If you have plenty of spare time clean up the old one and use it for a picture frame. It'll be cheaper and likely have more space. Isn't this the accepted non-geek use for an old laptop? If you have LOTS of spare time, consider using it for a geeky project like controlling a robot. Serial ports use to be standard on laptops but now you have to buy USB->serial adapters. So for some things the old laptop is actually better and cheaper to use. You could even consider donating it to your local club. (I almost donated an old laptop to my r/c flying club. With a serial connected hardware module it could be used to monitor for r/c interference. In the end I decided against it because most of the guys at the club would rather have nothing to do with a computer on a Saturday morning).
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Some say the hard disk is half full. Some say the hard disk is half empty. A true geek upgrades anyway.
New Asus eee is 900 MHz. Old Compaq Evo N610C is 2.4 GHz. The Compaq has a much bigger screen, same RAM, twice the disk and goes for half the price.
...and put Ubuntu 8.04 on it. I'm using it everyday for work and have never been so satisfied with a computer before. (And that's after I've been using Macs for 15 years.) I'd say it's definitelty worth instead of some el cheapo laptop. However, I don't think it replaces any of the new netbooks, as they are much smaller, lighter, a bit faster and come with SSD. BTW, Thinkpads are very well supported under Ubuntu. Actually mine boots as fast as OS X on my 2Ghz Dual Core iMac and the GUI feels snapier.
It's amazing what you can run on these things.
I keep shoving hair into the fan intake of my laptop and now it's not running properly. What am I doing wrong?
No problems with BIOS limitations if you put the /boot partition on the beginning of the big fat drive.
No memory compatibility issues if you do your homework.
Spare parts are WAY cheap on ebay. You can fix the broken keyboard or the flakey trackpad for just a couple of dollars.
New batteries are $50 if you look and they work even better than the originals.
Full service manuals are available for download from the manufacturers. A couple of tiny screwdrivers and a clean place to work, and that old clunker is better than new.
A 2002 laptop is made in Taiwan from from better plastic that doesn't stink like the new Chinese laptops.
I used to laugh at old laptops until I bought one and now I use it every day. The best part is that I don't worry about it getting stolen, I can buy a whole stack of them for what a new one costs.
Honestly, the IBM (now Lenovo) Thinkpads are probably one of the few models of laptops that *may* make a little sense to "refurbish", to get more life out of them.
Their utilitarian, black plastic cases tend to take more abuse than most before really looking "worn out" or "old". (No fancy silver paint to flake off, or aluminum shells to get dents or real obvious scratches in them, etc.) I've also noticed that batteries for most of them can be had for less money than many other brands.
At the same time, much of their userbase tends to be people not interested in flashy "extras". They just need a reliable "not too thin/breakable" portable to connect to the Internet with, edit documents, and other such basics.
But even given all of THAT, I'd question the point to the whole thing. I mean, do we need this article to tell us the common sense that "Hey, if you upgrade your system's hard drive and RAM, it'll run as much as 30% faster!" ??
Yeah, that's been true for pretty much every computer, laptop or desktop, throughout history... and it's often a good idea to do during the *viable life* of the system (first 1-3 years of use). After that, the cost/benefits tilt towards just buying a whole new machine, if you're feeling the need to spend ANY more money on the one you've got.
Look around on ebay. If you can't find the hinges, buy a dead one for a few dollars and cannibalize the hinges.
Download the service manual, it gives step-by-step instructions on how to replace anything.
My T21 works fine running under Kubuntu at the present and does exactly what I need it to do (it has a wireless card).
Over the last 6 years, I might have put in less than 100$ into it.
If I can find a 2nd hand laptop for under $350, I might look into but I have no need right now.
So let me laugh at your 'old' R50.
In our house we have a good desktop, a good laptop, and one old laptop and old desktop.
If the old laptop dies, it still gives me plenty of time to look around without going into a foolish purchase.
Very few buyers will worry about how much RAM etc it has. Most won't pay more than $x unless it has a fast CPU.
If you think that it is worth spending the extra $125 to have a faster machine for yourself, that's fine, but don't try rationalize it with resale value.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
The write cycle failure time on most CF cards is so long, you should get at least a few more years of use out of it (and CF cards will be that much cheaper by then). Even then, from what I understand, write cycle failures are just that - a failure to write. You can get a new drive, copy the contents to the new drive and be good to go.
I'll give him $40 for it. That's about what it's worth.
My old Compaq laptop's plastic case is WAY stronger and WAY less susceptible to scratches than any of the new laptops I've used or seen. It's 6 years old and looks like brand new.
It has WiFi, who cares about Bluetooth.
My old laptop has battery life that it would not have dreamed about when it was new because the new battery ($50) has significantly more capacity than the original and the 2.6 tickless kernel uses way less power than any OS from back then.
The better OS is free! Why spend money on Vista?
My laptop cost $300 and it runs Google Earth and Firefox 3 almost as well as my gnarly Opteron workstation. With the extra $700 my wife and I can have a lot more fun than one can have with a new MacBook!
The hard drive is the most time-consuming part to replace, as you have to reinstall your OS and applications at the same time. Always go the best/fastest on it. I threw a 7200rpm in my X31 and it's a noticible difference in speed, while not much different on battery life. Good stuff.
-m
http://www.invisik.com
Ha ha ha.
New battery is $50. 802.11g wireless card is $30 and goes in the mini-PCI slot where the useless modem was. No dongles. You're the one with the dongle if you want to plug in your GPS.
Screen, backlight, and DVD drive still work great. Old case has nice texture instead of sexy new shiny finish that attracts scratches and fingerprints.
You've spent at least $600 and have a laptop that smells like a chemical factory. I've spend $400 and have a laptop and $200 left in my pocket.
I "know" that a new battery cost me $50, and it's even better than the original was.
The used laptop that I paid $300 for, over a year and a half ago, is going for $200 now, and it blows the doors off an eee.
'Refresh' an R50?
Try eliminating the spyware first. Total cost for 28% faster = $0.
I just wiped clean a T20 for my wife, added 128MB RAM to get up to 256M and loaded XP.
Works great, and the screen is nice.
Cost:
Free T20 that was getting tossed - $0
128MB from Craigslist - $5
XP license from long-gone neighbor's computer - $0
Orinoco Silver Combo card from the old days - $0
I spent $5.
OK, it took me a couple of hours to load XP and all the goodies, but I have a solid laptop that plays DVDs, burns CDs, browses the web (wired or wireless), gets email..... you get the picture.
I am laughing since you spent way too much!
Self Defense - A Human Right www.a-human-right.com
...but I haven't seen any other replies that mention it, so I will, just to make sure the painfully obvious isn't neglected.
Install Puppy Linux on it. That's it, $0 fix. Suddenly it's lightning fast and capable again. Won't do jack for the surely dead/dieing battery, but my experience with laptop batties is that they are a money hole anyway, docking stations FTW.
"Replacement batteries are either used up themselves, insanely expensive, or impossible to find."
Or $50 brand new, better than the original, and available all over the place. It just depends on whether you actually bother to look first.
yea thats right. toshiba portege 3890ct 700mhz 256megs 12gig hd..... i spent 200 bucks on it 3 years ago? i dunno but i can say its still rocking! i do webwork with it to, and some basic photo editing with gimp. :-) (its not hard!)
so is an older laptop worth it? heck yea!
you just might want to learn how to rebuild battery packs
bored? try this http://jadmadi.net/blog/2005/01/27/linux-wine-how-to-running-windows-viruses-with-wine/
I took win 98 off my wife's Pentium 2, 186Mb machine and put on danm small linux. It was like a new machine. boots in under 30 seconds and all the programs with their low graphics usage run snappy. The battery doesn't work and the screen is barely back lit but that doens't matter.
try Damn small. It hardly matters if you boot of CD or HD so just try it out.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
This is the key: AC power is available everywhere.
Take the battery out of your laptop and throw it away. It's dead weight - without it your laptop becomes truly portable.
Laptop manufacturers have missed a significant market by not producing lightweight laptops that use only AC power (_no_ battery packs).
Flakey memory is a common undiagnosed cause of system instability (along with bad power supplies). Testing the memory should be the first task performed after buying it from a place with a good return policy.
TO START
PRESS ANY KEY
Where's the 'ANY' key? I see Esk, Kitarl, and Pig-Up...
For work, play, school ? Absolutely not.
...
...
... before it died finally..
...
... when I am next to a machine I end up working, or reading dox, except when the machine is useless for anything else than "surfing"...
...
YES: for a
garage computer: to check that "how to fix my XYZ headlamps.
bedroom computer: to browse around, without having to put your shiny macbook next to the bed so your SO can step on it in the morning
kitchen computer: recipes
living room computer: to IMDB that movie trailer, or to run MTR (multi trace route) during an online game, to see your current latency (ping)
asterisk/appliance box: damaged screen, damaged keyboard/touchpad? Still perfect for a quiet always on application. Well I run my asterisk on NSLU, but my close next guess was my OOOLD vaio
A 5 year old machine should also have DVD playback capabilities, USB ports, etc, so they are perfect as a car pc, toilet pc, bathroom pc.... or whatever
I actually have a 6+ year old Toshiba near my bed. It annoys the hell out of me with windows on it, and it is slow as hell, but to quickly google something, or spend a lazy Saturday morning "surfing the net", it is perfect. Oh yeah
just my 2c
I've done this on a few old laptops. A couple of notes:
- Disk drives. Costs go down. A lot. For older HDDs @ 3600 or 4200rpm, if you have anywhere near a reasonable amount of memory, this is the easiest and best bang for the buck.
- Memory. If you buy new memory, the prices for older 'architectures' go up. Check out the price of 1GB pc2700 sodimm vs 1gb pc5300 sodimm (DDR2). It's about 2 to 3 times the cost for the older pc2700.
- CPU. Never actually done this, but have thought about it on some occasions. Best to find some boards or references where it has been done successfully - and which CPUs are OK. Actually finding a CPU can be hard.
Ultimately, I end up maxing out my RAM either when I buy it or within the first year. Hard disk drives, I just buy the minimum size at the time of purchase as I can pick up a cheaper and bigger one later on.
Also, it's worthwhile considering a NSLU2 or the like as a cheaper permanent storage solution and keeping the 'latest' information on the smaller laptop storage.
Cheers
ws
So does Anonymous Coward have good karma?
Yours was broken, you to replace the keyboard.
I just turned in a 4 year old T40 Thinkpad that had an 80GB drive and 1GB RAM. The RAM is the only thing that wasn't stock. Employer paid for the 512MB stick.
But I also bought my own Bluetooth USB adapter as this machine had none. A Trendnet, about $17.00.
I also disabled the built in 801.11b wireless NIC and bought a PCCard 801.11g NIC from Compusa for net $4.00.
I also bought a USB mulimedia card reader for mini/micro/SD cards as this machine had none. About $10.00.
And last but not least I had to replace the battery recently. Employer paid for the battery.
In my opinion old laptops are only useful as stationary servers for some specific purpose like a router or a home media center or something where you need a small low powered unobtrusive box that runs quiet. If the USB and SVGA ports run you don't even need a keyboard/skidpad or a screen. Take out the battery, chuck it, if the screen doesn't work, chuck that too. Voila you have a 3 lb server.
It is illogical to think that a cart can go faster than the slowest horse.
The best bet is probably just to allow it to gracefully degrade. However, if a revival is to be attempted: If it's slow and shutting down, it's probably just dust (assuming good software practices).
Disassemble it, blow the dust off everything, remove the heatsink from the CPU for thoroughness, and make sure you get inbetween all copper fins. If there's little dust, or just proactively, toss a drop of sewing machine (light machine) oil into the fans ~ there will be a little circle, probably under a sticker, that can be pryed off.
If the system is mechanically well, the next most likely canidate is the hard drive. Check the S.M.A.R.T. log for failures.. a new hard drive can do wonders for a system under an I/O bottleneck: 4200rpm drives are disasters.
Beyond these measures, most anything else is going to cost more than it's worth. I take in old laptops (mostly bricked) for repair and distribution to those less fortunate in the neighbourhood. There are a lot of "excess" laptops around, that can be had for less than $200CAD or so, often free. I currently get 1/3 upto a usable state, though often this means soldering (power connectors and voltage regulators have a tendency to break from the PCB).
(I'm on 2007 T60. After removing most of the 'thinkvantage' stuff, I can understand one's affection for thinkpads!)
!Equality through palindromes semordnilap hguorht ytilauqE!
My oldest notebook is a Mitac 6120N. It's done for, sadly, first because the backlight won't come on unless I unplug the power supply and let it go on battery, and then switch the screen from LCD to CRT and back. Of course this battery, a replacement, is old enough to live for about 15 minutes. Sad. It's finally on the shelf cause it won't run Xp for more than 30 minutes without an ACPI error and BSOD, and won't run Ubuntu for more a few minutes before it traps a panic for the same thing. Strange, it used to run XP just fine, but the old ACPI bug in this BIOS is now not tolerated. I bet it's a recent patch, but it's toast. A PIII-533 with 129MB RAM seems pitiful but it surfs and does email just fine.
My current notebook is an Acer something, identical to a Dell SmartStep 250N... P4-2.8, 1G RAM. Works fine, despite a broken latch, keys wearing down, and it will overheat if you leave it on a flash animation or the screensaver kicks in after a hard session. It's an old dog, but it still bites.
Of course, at work, they just refereshed our T40s with T61s. Such a waste... All I got out of it was my Virtual PC 2004 flaking out cause Core Duos mess with the timers... Pus.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
The screen bulb dims over time. Compared to a new notebook the screen on this baby is dull. A new CCFL will require skill to solder in or cost money. If this can be done then a full refurbishment can be made to get it back to scratch.
As for swapping hard drives, it is easier to make a 10G space, defrag the hard drive and install linux. An extra drive can be mounted on USB to get shared disk space between the XP and Penguin. The 'user files' can be migrated onto there.
Batteries are also important, not to mention power cords. Only worth doing if the model is a classic. One day these will be collectable and if the CCFL+batteries are sorted now then the notebook makes the transition from junk to of-value.
Failing that, the notebook can be used even if the keyboard, screen and batteries are duff running a home server for mythtv and anything else. A Dyndns address in the router is all that is needed for that and time installing linux.
If the hardware compatibility is good with linux, just download and install a light-weight linux distro and viola, it's back running faster than a brand new Vista laptop! ok, you may still need to replace the battery unless you don't mind carry the power brick with you all the time.
I've had older systems running Linux and they run just fine after 5+ years. The problem is older systems running Windows, having to run increasingly complex virus detection or windows update programs. If Windows had followed KISS and Open Source principles, it is doubtful that they would have such problems.
Ever since the Pentium Pro came out one had real chips that could be used for real computers. I was running dual processor PP systems as far back as something like 1997 and I suspect I could still be using them effectively today. Though I would probably switch to more integrated AMD multi-core chip & integrated graphics designs.
The problem isn't in your hardware. Its the operating system. If you dumped Windows and upgraded to a Linux OS, e.g. Ubuntu you might find that your system worked just fine.
The only new computer I ever bought was a Tandy 1500 HD laptop back in 1991. Paid around $1500 for it, as I recall it had a whopping 640k of RAM, 4 color grayscale passive-matrix LCD, 10 Meg hard drive, and ran at 4.77 Mhz. Oh, it was a powerhouse. QuickBasic and TurboPascal and Jetboot Jack, those were the days.
Since then I have only run used boxes, from friends who needed upgrade help and paid me with their old equipment, thrift stores, and occasionally eBay.
Right now I am posting this from a Gateway laptop, 2.4 ghz Celeron with 512 max RAM, a 40 gig hard drive and a wireless card. It is the communications machine (IRC, IM, etc). Got it used, stuck the wireless card, 256 more megs of ram, and a new battery in it. Total investment roughly $180. Ubuntu Gutsy screams on it.
My development box is a Dell 2.4 ghz Celeron box with a gig of RAM, 160 gig hard drive and not much else. Paid ~$160 for it on eBay, another $30 for half a gig of RAM and $5 at the thrift store for a like-new 17-inch monitor. It also runs Gutsy. I use it for file storage and virtual machines, mostly VMware Debian Lamps and an OpenSolaris VM for the Solaris courses, and a Virtualbox container with XP Pro because NetObjects doesn't run under Wine. Total investment less than $200.
Old hardware is as good as the use you can get out of it.
My 5-year-old laptop is doing just fine, all parts working as new, even the battery. The software works even better than new, because I replaced XP with Ubuntu in 2005 (and all of the hardware was supported directly, except the media button).
It's not for sale, because I expect to get a few more years out of it. Its performance is just fine, and there are still very few laptops that can match its display. However it's not an IBM or Dell, it's a Sony Vaio (1.7GHz, 1GB, 80GB, DVD+-RW, 17" 1920x1200, wired+11g, bluetooth, 3xUSB2, Firewire, etc.).
Will I lose karma by not criticizing Sony? OK, its battery life sucks and always has sucked - barely 2 hours (because of the really nice display).
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Ah "Better than new" - yet another exaggeration
I'd say that:
- Internal 802.11g ($30, goes in mini-PCI slot instead of useless WinModem)
- 160 Gb Drive
- Better than new battery
counts as 'better than new'
I have sent several older laptops to http://aqstech.com/ for repair. They did a great job. I have two functioning Sony laptops (identical) with 17" monitors. Batteries are cheap online from batteries.com ~ way cheaper than buying batteries from the stores... if you can find them! These are great machines, and I don't mind revitalizing them at all. For a few hundred bucks I've got nice, fast, portable computers. I'm looking for more!
A bit disappointing that he missed a trick there: Considering the tight budget, telling us to fork out $40+ on backup software instead of pointing tghe reader to e.g. clonezilla live cd. That's, like, another 33% on top of the stated budget. Plus: How is this news? Anyone on /. that doesn't know to put more memory in an old machine should really be somewhere else...
CheShA: Manchester Breakcore / Drill and Bass Yes I'm a s
Worth it? Hard to say. There definitely is business quality and home quality but the sweat equity was high. You expect the battery to be very weak and cost you if you want portability. But the fact that the "M" key could be said to work only if you hit the upper-right corner _just_ right was annoying and not so cheap a component even do-it-yourself. Needed an updated wireless card, and, ideally, removing the old on-board one. Reverts you to the original XP SP1 so you can imagine the updating. 8-10 pixels out -- although I can't say I notice them in practice.
So it depends on your money/free time ratio. It could be called "green" to keep something that meets your needs out of the landfill though.
...if not more resources to deal with their constant replacement.
Unlike those overly cheapened laptops, the Thinkpad will be there before and after.
If you're going to replace it, take that $350, wait a couple months and start looking for the non-widescreen T60p. The article's author already has a decent model, and those T60p's aren't too far from $1000. They are indeed worth every penny.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
http://www.toshiba-europe.com/computers/products/notebooks/t1100plus/
And yes it ran linux (ELKS)
Beat that ;)
Worse still is that the link for a replacement that they're comparing to is a brand new cutting edge laptop with a 128GB SSD.
To state it simply, the best way to phrase the question is, "Is it worth it to upgrade a 5 year old laptop for $125 a level equivalent to a $350 bargain laptop?" References to current value of 5 year old laptop (basically salvage value) and to top-of-the-line current laptops are extraneous and misleading. I thought this was /. not digg.
TANSTAAFL GIGO Acronyms to live by!
It is also illogical to apply logic to a joke! He said that the fastest horse was slowed down a bit by dragging all of the...
Well, never mind.
Cole's Axiom: The sum of the intelligence on the planet is a constant. The population is growing.
I just sold a 5 year old powerbook for $450 - cheap compared to recent transactions on eBay.
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
While 5 years is pushing it, just what kind of laptop the old laptop is will make a difference in how it compares to modern sub-par $400 garbage laptops. I call them that from experience, because I've bought two in the last two years. And while next year's cheapest laptops will still be garbage, they're sure to be better than the single-core POS with 512MB RAM that I got last year. On the other hand, I just went shopping again and picked up a Gateway FX laptop for $1400 - I do not expect to see a cheapo $400
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No, didn't you hear? The fastest horse drags along the slower ones! Duh!
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Only if you raise your horses to be polite. Otherwise, slow gets dragged by a faster son of a bitch.
If we were talking about a DOG team, of course, you can raise all your dogs to be polite and they can all still be sons of a bitch.
"It's no use Marty. Even the fastest horse in the world can't run faster than 35 MPH." - Doc, BTTF III