Posted by Fred34 4/3/2025
The older they are, the better they are, but even the modern ones are still pretty good. Like the OP mentions, the market for parts is strong and it's easy to get what you need. Then when you go to sell them, they sell for a good amount. That W510 is worth at least $100 in its current condition.
Everyone agrees the build quality used to be better (my grandpa already said this about appliances from his youth). But one thing I almost never see discussed is the power consumption of these old devices. Older CPUs often double as room heaters. Modern ones, especially the Apple M-series, have become a lot more efficient. So while I agree that modern laptops suck in many ways, I would do the math to see if it's actually cheaper to buy and use an older computer. Maybe not if you're in Qatar or Russia but some countries have extremely high electricity costs.
At maximum, a T580 can draw 44 watts. 8 hours per day, 365 days a year, at 50 cents a kWh (quite expensive for the US), that's $65 a year. That's a several-year-old computer already.
The W520 can draw a much higher (but still low relative to a desktop) 150 watts. The cost per year to run it would then be around $220/year - but again, that's assuming maximum power draw for much of the day every day. Your home refrigerator uses more than twice that.
For most people, I don't see this cost increase as a problem.
Even if you add a 210 l upright freezer to it is is still less than 300 kWh per year. That's 300 kWh / (365 * 24 h) = 34 W
Kidding, of course. Here's what I recommend:
The single best thing you can do for your machine is get a SATA SSD into it. That will 10x the performance of your system for most tasks immediately. After that, max out your RAM at 16GB DDR3.
Assuming a 500GB SSD, you can do both of these things using new parts for less than $100, and if you get used parts, for less than $50.
A system with a 2nd-gen i5 or especially i7, 16GB RAM, and 500GB SSD storage will be fast enoug for essentially every modern computing task that isn't modern gaming, graphic design, video editing, or complex programming (it'll be good enough for simple coding tasks). You can do whatever else you want.
As far as batteries, my recommendations are twofold: Get the highest-wattage charger you can (probably a 170watt for the T520, I think) and the largest battery possible. New ones are available on eBay. You want the "extended life" models. They're not great, but they should get you a few hours of usage. Depending on what you get and where it's from, it's another $20-$50.
I wish the graphic driver could be better as playing Youtube videos constantly crashes Firefox on Ubuntu. Other than that I have nothing to complain. I have been using it for 3+ years with zero maintenance (I didn't even bother to clean the fan) and it never failed me.
I have a second "new" Dell workstation laptop standing by just in case it breaks down. But it is a Windows machine with 32GB of memory, so I'll probably use WSL2 instead.
Do you have the xf86-video-intel driver installed? Try removing that package and just relying on the kernel modesetting DRI driver instead. That's been the recommended way to run Intel graphics for long time now.
I don't know if that's your issue, but it this caused a lot of weird issues on my x270 with Firefox.
Not sure if the T470S had the Nvidia option but disabling Optimus (and going either fully with the Nvidia chip or integrated intel GPU) can also solve issues sometimes
It is in a mint condition, not a single scratch, and I don't want to throw it out for sure. I have an old OpenBSD on it, it is perfect for some light C coding using mg. :)
But if the password is a harddisk password, you are SOL :( You will need to get a new HD.
I found this: http://asknotes.com/2018/09/04/removing-supervisor-password-...
I am not certain, however! We will see.
For the tech people at work it was not a too difficult thing to do.
I am no longer there, so I have no one to ask now :(
I spent $100 on what I thought was a legit and reputable local middleman for laptop batteries (of course they just buy from China), but even then first battery was half dead on arrival, and second free replacement was dead in around just under a year with rapid capacity decline after 6 months.
I am going to look at another vendor. Maybe GreenCell?
IT data destruction companies all remove the storage, and put the device back on ebay the same day.
i guess i am a hoarder? Hate to throw away useful working things..
It's difficult to know exactly when a server might fail. It might be within 1 month of its build, it might be 50 years. But what's clear is that failure isn't less likely as the machine gets older, it's more likely. There are outliers, but they;re rare. The failure modes for these things are well recorded, and the whole thing is designed to fail within a certain number of hours (if it's not the hard drive, it's the fan, the cpu, the memory, the capacitors, the solder joints, etc). It doesn't get better as it ages.
But environmental stress is often a predictor of how long it lives. If the machine is cooled properly, in a low-humidity environment, is jostled less, run at low-capacity (fans not running as hard, temperature not as high, disks not written to as much, etc), then it lives longer. So you can decrease the probability of failure, and it may live longer. But it also might drop dead tomorrow, because again there may be manufacturing flaws.
If given the choice, I wouldn't buy an old machine, because I don't know what kind of stress it's had, and the math is stacked against it.
Is this true? Doesn't most hardware have a dip in failure rate in the middle of its average lifespan?
I also believe there's a psychic component to failures. The machines know when you're close to product launch, or when someone has just discovered the servers haven't been maintained in a while and are at risk of failing. Then they'll fail for sure. Especially if there are hot-spare or backup servers, which will conveniently fail as well.
The white plastic macbook is in decent shape too with just standard light scratching on the body. It was sold for parts only but worked just fine. Needed a battery replacement, and I found some old magsafe "L" chargers for cheap. Maxed out the RAM at 4GB (Supports 6GB (4G+2G) but 1pc of 4GB DDR2 are expensive).
The 2008 unibody macbook needed the lower body replaced (bad keyboard main issue) but the rest of it works fine. The original battery still worked and held some charge, but I got a 3rd party one anyway along with the magsafe "L" charger. Maxed out RAM at a usable 8GB DDR3. This was also sold dirt cheap "for parts".
Both ran MX Linux for awhile until I needed the SATA SSDs. They now sit with their old mechanical hdds and the last supported OSX versions on them. Maybe one day I'll get around to selling them.
Unlike the 4 or so Dell (and Asus) laptops (that came with Linux preinstalled) that preceded this one, it can simultaneously support:
* Bluetooth. Yay!
* Wifi. Yay!
* Sleeps when the lid closes. Yay!
* Stays asleep when in my bag. Yay!
It's also reasonably fast and decently capable, but the not-trying-to-commit-heat-death-suicide-in-my-bag and supporting BOTH Wifi AND Bluetooth at the same time are really the biggest features.