A £100 second-hand ThinkPad X250 is still my favourite laptop

My daughter has the same laptop (I bought it for her a long time ago). When she brought it with her when visiting me in Canada from Australia this summer, she asked me to look at it because Win10 wouldn't let her in and she needed her files and pics.

So, I booted a Fedora USB and backed up her files. When I asked her if she wanted me to install Fedora Workstation on it to continue using it, she said "Yes!" because "She loves this laptop and doesn't want to buy a new one."

Fedora runs beautifully fast on this system with 8GB of RAM and will probably last her a long time.

My favorite laptop has consistently been the one that I can buy off the second-hand business surplus market for cheap, and has a plethora of replacement parts available on ebay. Up until the whole PC market got stupid about a year ago, anyway.

My current daily driver is a Dell Precision 7550. It has a nice 15" display, touchpad buttons with a middle-mouse button, USB-C + Thunderbolt. Keyboard is not great, but not terrible. I did have to buy a new battery for it. I don't know what I'm going to do if/when it dies, because neither Dell nor Lenovo make a laptop now that I am interested in owning in 3-4 years.

I originally bought my MacBook Air M1 just as a transitional computer because my old, incredibly expensive Intel MacBook Pro had been stolen, and I was waiting for a newer MacBook Pro model. But I grew so fond of the Air that I couldn't bring myself to part with it again. It's lightweight, has incredible performance (more powerful than the most powerful Intel-based Pros), the battery lasts a long time, the keyboard is comfortable, and the design is more curved than the Pro (and the newer Air models), which means it doesn't dig into your wrists.

I have several Thinkpads, but my favorite is a T420s.

AFAIK, it was the last of the line that had sculpted keytops, it feels good to type on. It's a damned shame that the newer ones have those chicklet keys.

i7 with 16GB RAM, HDD replaced with SSD. Runs Fedora like a top.

Siemens Nixendorf Scenic Mobile 300, 133 MHz Pentium (before we had to number them), 16 MB of RAM, 800×600 passive matrix LCD, released 1997. I caused a major scandal at my high school since nobody on the staff had ever contemplated the scenario whereby a student turned up with a computer of their own. I dual booted Windows NT 4.0 and Linux (2.2 kernel I think).

Oh, the simple things in life!

For anyone still running these older ThinkPads, where do you get new batteries from? I've not yet replaced any of mine but the aftermarket world for these seems rife with super-sketchy knockoffs that I'm certain will not be trustworthy. Any recommendations for known-good manufacturers of batteries for X230-X270 era? I'm in NA but I don't really care where I have to order from, I just want batteries that actually even vaguely resemble OEM reliability.

Edit: Ohh I see someone started a thread on this already: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50340218

I’m happy to see more pushback against consumer culture, and I’m happy this system meets the needs of the author.

Of course, the other part of this are people who use computers to do much heavier workloads.

There are a pretty large list of activities where every time you have some significant gain like ~50-300% performance gain, there may be legitimate justification to buy the new hardware.

As a person who plays games as a hobby I’m pretty much buying a new GPU/processor anytime there’s something affordable that will double my frame rate or anytime there’s a game that comes out that I can’t play or won’t play at decent settings.

My old hardware is never wasted, someone else buys it and uses it until it physically degrades too much to be used.

Computers as a hobby or working device are a heck of a lot less expensive and wasteful than a lot of other activities even if you go crazy on consumerism.

Think about the weight of your laptop and how that compares to the weight of just one gallon of gasoline. Surely a week to a month of commuting is worse for the planet than buying a brand new laptop, right? For the record, I don’t actually know for certain whether it is, but that seems like a fair guesstimation.

From a cost standpoint, $100 is damn impressive to have a working functional laptop that gets your work done, but arguably $1000 or $2000 isn’t a whole lot of monkey, either. That kind of money is roughly equivalent to one round trip ticket to Europe, renting a minivan for a we […]