I maintain a 17 year old ThinkPad

Posted by Fred34 4/3/2025

I maintain a 17 year old ThinkPad(pilledtexts.com)

620 points | 580 commentspage 11

DeathArrow 4/3/2025|

>Despite their age, these business-class laptop are still serviceable and useful for web browsing, ‘office work’, and light coding.

In the world of Javascript frameworks where you download and execute 100 MB for a web application?

In the world of desktop applications written in Javascript?

51Cards 4/3/2025||

My W530 is 13-ish years old and it's still my daily driver. It doesn't travel anymore (now wired into my desk) but still works great running Win 10. I code on this thing all day and so far have only had to replace a fan and give it an SSD upgrade.

rkagerer 4/3/2025||

I still drive a Dell Precision M6600 from 2011, and liken the build quality, robustness and modularity of that era of the product line to the Thinkpads being discussed here.

I'm overdue to upgrade, but know I won't love its replacement anywhere near as much.

methuselah_in 4/3/2025||

I have bought laptop in 2013 asus rog gaming one i suppose before it as well. Still rocking with i7. But it can still work with windows 11 but tpm makes it useless. So I have tried windows 11 but it hangs a bit linux runs smoothly.

yu3zhou4 4/3/2025||

Respect! I still run x230 with Linux for fun and so my kids can smash the keys on the keyboard (btw imho the keyboard feeling is better than in any laptop I used since then) and they feel good about themselves that they do the same thing as dad

dopadelic 4/3/2025||

I used my T420 up till 2021.

I upgraded the screen to a 1920x1080 IPS panel.

SSD.

I have a full-fledged workstation for anything that needs heavy lifting and I primarily used the laptop as a device to remote into my workstation.

It was perfectly fine for standard web browsing and youtube.

Melatonic 4/3/2025|

How hard was it to upgrade the screen ?

silexia 4/5/2025||

I don't understand why anyone still buys Apple products now? They are designed to fail at a certain age and cost a fortune and can't compete on tech specs.

barkut 4/3/2025||

X220 owner here. You will have to pry it from my dead cold hands. I don't use anything that can't run on it well, my workflow is mostly shell based. Even Firefox don't do that bad when JS is disabled.

kodt 4/3/2025||

I have a 14 year old T420, I upgraded the processor, ram, hard drive, battery, and wifi chip several years ago which really sped it up and gave it more usable life. Still runs great for most things.

Melatonic 4/3/2025||

If you're using Windows on it I highly recommend looking into the last version of Windows 10 LTSC - it's basically a completely stripped down version without all the crap (no spyware, windows store, candy crush, etc). Anything you really need to add back is easy (like if you do need a windows store app for example)

With an SSD it boots insanely fast and consumes very little resources at idle. And will get security updates for many years to come. It's really the perfect OS for the T420 (or Linux of course - although I'd actually prefer Windows for a classic Thinkpad).

Bit hard to buy legally (you need to go through a VAR - there are some who will definitely sell you single copies). Core Windows 10 without all the bloat is actually a really impressive and lightweight OS considering the massive backwards compatibility and huge backlog of free software. Not to mention the insane breadth of hardware it will run on.

ukd1 4/3/2025||

I have few old thinkpads X220, X230, etc - outside of raw power, the two things that really suck are the speakers (they're truly trash), and the standard screen's performance with anything but trivial light around it.

Still, it's fast enough to use with linux, and the keyboard is a joy to use. Swappable batteries are fun, and useful.

However, I can't really use one outside of just nostalgia, or for tuning cars.

kodt 4/3/2025||

Yeah, they aren't really suitable for heavy workloads.

atxtechbro 4/3/2025|

As an E15 Gen 2 owner, I'm in awe of you wizards keeping these ancient ThinkPads alive - my modern entry-level machine suddenly feels inadequate despite having 4x the processing power!

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