ofc I imediatly upgraded it from winxp to gnu/linux
It’s a hype for very old, repairable laptops. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, if you want a repairable laptop go for a Framework
you can’t get a framework for 20€ on ebay tho + old thinkpads (older laptops in general) are just way robuster and have better build quality in general
Old laptops are pure suffering. I’d much rather pay the price for a more recent one
If you can afford and you want, the only argument I can put forward is less ewaste if you give a second life to the many very decent professional thinkpads that are retired every year. My employer is now going for a 5 year renewal cycle, used to be 3 for a long time. Unfortunately I couldn’t even buy back mine when it expired because it is a lease subcontract. It had an i5 7th gen and 32gb ram, was buttery smooth even running windows and I dreamt of running Linux on these.
Depends on what you call ‘old’ and what your use case is. My T495 was less than 300€ and it does everything I need from a laptop easily. Bigger drive would be nice, but once the summer is over I rarely need to pull 4K video from sd-cards in temporary storage, so I doubt I’ll bother to upgrade it any time soon.
ThinkPads are business machines and those are extremely repairable compared to consumer machines. Even my shitty Dell precision has instructions on how to disassemble it etched onto the mainboard. And since business laptops get dumped after a few years of relatively light use (many are de facto stationary), you can get pretty good machines for very cheap.
ThinkPads are just very popular, because they are consistently pretty good and don’t stand in your way softwarewise, which isn’t always true for Dell or HP machines.
I had 4 Dells in the last 4 years. Two different models, each one required one RMA, and both are absolute garbage. Granted, they’re workstations and not ultrabooks, but those things need thrust reversers so the fans don’t blow them off the desk, they run extremely hot and have countless stupid bugs. For example USB devices sometimes not working after suspension. Or randomly turning on and getting hot for no reason.
And these fuckers have more coil whine than anything I’ve ever experienced.
My old ThinkPad (which had almost the same components as the first Dell) didn’t have any of these problems.
I don’t like Dell.
