The laptop that won’t die
The story of how my 12-year-old $200 ThinkPad outlasted two high-end MacBooks.
What kind of laptop is this in the photo? This is the most indestructible computer that can work continuously and at the same time does not want to die that I have ever owned.
Anyway, that’s enough. Let’s stop there for now.
I won’t be too lazy to write this entire post about him, but in short I’ll say this.
Do you need a modern, attractive looking, lightweight and powerful laptop? Buy something expensive from Apple or Microsoft.
What if you need something else? Something that will cost almost no money and will last until the sun goes out? Then get an old, used ThinkPad.
Let me explain my position.
My iron history started a week ago when I was working on my MacBook Pro.
This is my main laptop that I bought in 2017. I needed a machine with:
you could run Logic Pro (the best music editing software available to everyone);
high resolution screen (I have poor eyesight)
1 terabyte hard drive.
This was exactly the car that met all my requirements.
It was super expensive, but my goal when choosing a laptop was to purchase something with a high enough build quality that it would work for many years. I also hate electronic waste, so I try to fix my laptops to make them last as long as possible. I bought my first MacBook Pro in 2010, and I had it for seven years, including replacing a fried motherboard (thankfully, just before the end of the three-year warranty – it did pay off! Wow!)
What can I say about the newer 2017 MacBook Pro? I also had to repair it several times. As a result of some set of circumstances, he suffered water damage and this required some serious intervention. In addition, I replaced disgusting butterfly keyboard when it failed. I had to install a new battery twice.
But six years later he was still working!
Until last week, when out of the blue he ordered a long life.
I was working on my MacBook and closed the lid, getting ready to have lunch. When I opened it again 15 minutes later, the computer turned off. Unfortunately, I was unable to bring him back to life.
I ended up riding the bike and taking it to a local laptop repair center. A few hours later the technician sent me a message explaining what happened. It turned out that there was a short circuit on the logic board: “The battery controller is faulty,” he wrote. Since this chip is tightly soldered into the board itself, fixing the problem would require installing a new motherboard. Considering the prices of spare parts and the complexity of the work, the final cost would have been too high, so given that this laptop had problems in the past, the repairman did not recommend repairing it.
I agreed. I decided that after six years I would finally buy a new MacBook Pro. (I still have the same requirements, and the MacBook Pro is the best way to meet them all at once).
(As for the dead MacBook, then maybe I’ll try to buy a replacement motherboard and fix it myself so that I have a backup option. I’m pretty good at repairing laptops – with the caveat that modern MacBooks are difficult-to-repair examples of industrial miniaturization, so I might ruin everything. We’ll see!)
What should I do while I’m preparing to order a new laptop?
For work, I definitely needed a laptop computer.
So I got the only piece of computer technology in my house that never breaks down.
The same ancient ThinkPad that you saw in the photo above.
A little retrospective.
I bought it in 2018. Then I needed a Linux machine that I could use as a backup laptop. I didn’t want to spend a lot of money. When I asked, “What’s the best cheap laptop you can buy right now that’s good for running Linux?” the forum nerds were quick to point me to older ThinkPad models. These laptops are renowned for their reliability, exceptional build quality, and ease of repair and upgrading. After searching online, I discovered that an electronics store nearby had several 2011 ThinkPads in stock for $200 each. Without much thought, I went and picked up one of them.
And damn, those internet geeks were right!
Older ThinkPads are truly amazing machines. Their keyboards are simply amazing: comfortable, durable, with curves on every key so deep they practically hug your fingertips. Since the laptop is quite thick, there is enough vertical space for a pleasant key travel. They actually rise and fall, making it feel like you’re actually typing and not just tapping your fingers on fixed buttons, as is usually the case on modern Ultrabooks. I love typing on this device!
I also found that the old ThinkPad is very easy to upgrade.
The case opens with extraordinary ease. I bought a 500GB SSD for about $50 and replaced it in five minutes using nothing more than a regular screwdriver.
Despite its considerable age, the machine works quite quickly – thanks to the SSD and Linux, which puts less load on its old processor. Apps honestly open and close just as quickly as they do on my high-end MacBooks.
Of course, I don’t do anything that could seriously stress the ThinkPad’s antediluvian hardware. I don’t play games. I don’t edit videos and music using a bunch of plugins. (Although I did some light audio processing using Audacity, everything worked quite well and smoothly).
The worst thing you can say about this laptop is that it is heavy. In addition, the screen has low clarity and resolution, which is not very suitable for me due to vision problems.
But! If all you need is a simple machine for browsing the internet, making video calls (Zoom, Microsoft Teams, a lot of Linux-specific video chats work very well), listening to music, or even Discord, this is ideal.
The most important thing is that this car seems indestructible.
In all the years of owning the laptop, nothing has broken. Every time I open it, the ThinkPad works flawlessly. This laptop was created when my eldest son was six years old; He’s now grown up and off to college, and the laptop still works and appears to be in just as good condition as it was in 2011. Over the past twelve years, my family of four has gone through God knows how many laptops and electronic devices, most of which eventually died, broke, malfunctioned, were possessed by poltergeists, etc., but this thing is manly continues to live. She refuses to break.
To be fair, I don’t use this machine as my primary, everyday laptop. If this were so, then, most likely, something would have grunted long ago.
Except… there are plenty of people who have been using old ThinkPads as their daily machines for as long – or even longer – than this beast of mine has been around. And many of them feel great. When I recently talked about my T420, several people wrote that they also use ThinkPads of a similar vintage, and they also work flawlessly.
What can we say about ThinkPad? They’re built like damn tanks.
What follows from this? If you want a cheap machine, buy a used, old ThinkPad. They are usually easy to find on online classifieds sites. It’s free to install Linux, and since most people work in a browser these days, there’s even less of a barrier to mastering the operating system. (I wrote about this in blog last year).
Buy a ThinkPad now. And perhaps you will have it for the rest of your life.
