A single key for 15€?! I remember ordering one from an online shop specialized in replacement laptop keys at some point in the 2010s and it was like 2€ total. Browsing through similar shops now, it seems like the minimum is 5€ per key nowadays, but still a far cry from 15€.
>After spending more than 100 euros on plastic keys, which would soon break again, I calculated that my keyboard had 90 keys and that replacing them all just once would cost me 1,350 euros.
Someone who breaks keys this often could just buy the whole keyboard assembly FRU for ~30-50€ and take spare keys out of that, assuming it's not always the same ones that break.
So long as I know where the N and M keys are, that's all that matters :)
Unlike my daughter's friend's Dell, where basically everything had to come out of the laptop to get at the keyboard (battery, speakers, motherboard, etc), AND it was plastic-riveted down. I must have spent 2-4 hours replacing it, because I had to do it twice (for reasons I don't remember).
Some Thinkpads, more specifically x2xx series (ie x250 - x290) require removing all internals to get to the keyboard to replace it (batteries, storage, wifi, motherboard, speakers, CMOS battery, and a few others). Dell Latitude E5470 on the other hand allows replacing its keyboard by pulling out a small plastic panel and removing one screw.
I have had a similarly positive experience with older laptops, in particular ThinkPads (x230) and Latitudes (e7460). The older machines often also have much better keyboards than more recent laptops, IMHO.
As the OP writes, swapping out HDD for SSD (1 usually prefer at least 1 TB) and maxing out RAM are affordable things that you won't regret.
That said a used laptop is perfect for web browsing, office stuff, casual development and light gaming. When it dies you have no regrets. It is almost 20 years I have not bought a new laptop. Of course my kids have used laptops too. At some point they had Fujitsu Siemens with a Wacom stylus/digitizer. I do not think they still make those. They were rock solid and quite fun to use.
I only buy new laptops for my wife. She is very careful with her stuff, they last ages. I bought her a new one recently only to offer her a better screen.
All bought used, never spent more than maybe $250 and $200 for max RAM and nice SSD.
Unfortunately, with the advent of soldered ram and storage, this isn't feasible any more for more taxing uses. Most of the used devices will have the default ram and storage and you'll have to buy new so you can order the thing with enough resources.
I care more about all of those features than the replaceable parts.
Gaming like laptops are a no no for me, sorry. And I doubt there's anything just slightly larger than a macbook pro but with upgradeable components.
''The accessibility of this website depends on the weather in Barcelona, Spain''
At least at this time, Windows 11 is not that much heavier/resource-needy than Windows 10. There's a small but non-negligible number of people running Win11 on things like Thinkpad x250 or T450 (Inter 5th gen CPU), for example.
The regular Joe Schmoe prob won't be able to do that, but he's not likely to use 2015 laptop in 2024 to begin with...
Alternatively, can the community come up with some interesting uses for all the machines?
Google has targeted this model with ChromeOS Flex.
Everytime Microsoft does something that apparently pisses off people, we get tons of suggestions that now everyone is finally going to migrate in droves into GNU/Linux, and then nothing happens.
Meanwhile the only Linux based devices that are actually successful among normies, are those that hide the fact there is the Linux kernel running underneath, expose no CLI, and have everything done in basic graphical workflows without any FOSS religion.
Chromebooks, Android, DVD and BluRay players, TV setup boxes, SmartTVs,....
This is true for everything, not just laptops.
Any purchasing that occurrs on a fashion cycle is largly a rip off...
For instance, I would pay a lot to get my BlackBerry back, screw all that app bloarware nonsense. Fast email, phone, a good keyboard and long battery life, that is a winning combination, from a user's perspective. (And I actually prefer devices with no camera or microphone in it, for security reasons.)
Also, given that this is the author's work laptop, what's the economic justification for not investing in the primary tool you use for work?
The author explains that there are motivations not related to money (we live on a finite earth, the manufacturing of a laptop encompass a considerable amount of energy and raw materials for mining, etc).
Shouldn't the burden of proof be on the obverse - Why should one buy a new laptop when an old one will do? Your framing sounds to me like a post-hoc justification for consumerism. Why not "invest" in getting the absolute best in the primary means of transportation, or couch, TV or random product category?
1. Lack of USB-C ports means I wouldn't be able to safely use any USB-C only peripherals (since the USB spec explicitly bans adapters in that direction)
2. Lack of security updates for firmware, microcode, etc.
3. Hard to find replacement batteries from reputable sources
4. The CPU and memory requirements of software are steadily increasing
2+3. depends on the specific devices.
4. 10-15 years ago maybe that was still true. but the power and speed of devices no longer increases at the same rate. it has slowed down to the point that a 6 year old laptop performs just as well for my daily tasks as a 2 year old one and i run the same OS on both. the difference is only noticeable for modern games and some CPU/GPU intensive tasks. i also remember the same experience with even older laptops (i don't have one here right now, so i can't compare directly). what made the older laptops slower/less powerful was less RAM.
4. Not sure if I can agree. Most software I use just got more efficient over the years. Only exception being the IDE or code editor. #justlinuxthings
What I do instead is buy a moderately powerful new one and just use it until it dies -- I don't upgrade before the laptop is truly dead.
In other words it is more than possible to use laptops beyond those 8 years as long as you buy the right ones. Performance is fine as long as you run the right software, i.e. not software made by a hardware vendor who depends on a regular replacement cycle.
I also installed Linux on them too and the battery life was not great either. I could be an outlier but I've not had good experience with Thinkpads even though I liked them. My older Macbook actually lasted the longest.
buying used hardware is also hit or miss. i got another used laptop for $250 which is decent, but it has some strange hardware issues that i can't pinpoint. unfortunately the choices for used hardware are limited and i could not find any comparable devices in the same price range. (any alternatives would have cost more than twice as much)
so generally, when i can afford it, i do the same as you. get something new with a good price/performance ratio and use that as long as i can.
Bravo for you, but surely you realize that almost nobody does this? Hardly relevant to an article about getting some more useful life out of an old laptop.
The Old T430 I got from a relative who went to a MAC is also quite adequate for daily use. I have NetBSD on it and just finished upgrading to 10.1, so this was typed on that T430.
So unless you are a heavy duty gamer or work on complex 3d graphics professionally, any recently used laptop will work just as well.
Aaaaaanything but a nice efficient PC!
How’s the battery life? Going days without thinking about where my charger is can be really nice.
What resolution does the screen run?
So, just shy of 2 hours the level was at 5%, I usually run at Frequency 2200, the range is 1200 -- 2601. The lower the frequency, the longer the battery life. You can set on NetBSD freq. using:
sudo /sbin/sysctl -w machdep.cpu.frequency.target=2200
I set it via an entry in root's cron on reboot.
For resolution via the laptop screen is 1366x768, that is the highest on the Laptop monitor. As you can see it is a bit odd for some reason. On my external monitor I can go to 1920x1080 at about 60Hz. I think there were various models of the T430 and some had higher resolutions.
Note: The battery is original and is the larger Thinkpad battery. You can find new batteries on the WEB. I always use the T430 plugged in.
You had a laptop that didn’t meet your needs?
It is one of those big beasts with a number pad and decent GPU. I use it as a gaming PC. I was just last night playing Dead Island Riptide with default settings. It is probably the best computer purchase I have ever made.
My advice: keep an eye out for Dell refurb deals on slickdeals.com. They occasionally have half-off deals, which is what I scored.
But for rando ebay/web: is there some part of the supply chain where thousands or tens of thousands of machines hit a single point where it's scalable for, say, a software rootkit to efficiently be put on them?
E.g., I know universities typically buy a shit-ton of the same model. Where do they eventually unload them if they don't end up selling through their official used channel? Same for police/govt/etc.
I don't think the economics of, say, rooting a bunch of machines in the hopes of hacking a big Bitcoin wallet need to even make sense. There just needs to be an easy point of access to many machines, so that a confidence man can sell some poor schmuck on the idea that if they buy a rootkit and install it on all of them they'll make millions in Bitcoins (or whatever).
In 2023 I managed to get a barely used 2017 17" HP for $80 that runs Windows 11 fantastically and even happily runs some smaller LLMs.
A crappy laptop can be totally transformed by swapping out their spinning HDD for a super cheap SSD and adding another 8GB of cheap RAM.
Should I rephrase: computers are getting ridiculously powerful, but JavaScript cancels out everything? Or just low-quality software in general.
PS: I'm using 2014 laptop and only wish WWW wasn't such heavy garbage.
The best explanation I've had for this is that the rubber components degrade over time. But it makes me leery of buying older hardware because of that.
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25486191, 279 comments
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32674830, 111 comments
It's had no failures at all in its life apart from the battery. My two year old work laptop went in the trash after its USB ports all died.
This thing has been around the planet twice and it just keeps going.
Say you buy the laptop with a crude 3d printed case and when new money comes in you buy the titanium case. Spending the weekend swapping the parts over is a bonus.
It should be modular but extra crappy. 2 GB memory is a lot.
Ideally go full ship of theseus.
The specs are improving, but the experience is not improving in lockstep with it. Browsing & similar normal usage cases just doesn't need it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36646791
374 points, 530 comments
>I am still on my MacBook Pro 2015 because of the Keyboard and Trackpad. So in about 2 years time this will be 10 years of usage. I dont intend to replace it any time soon. For browsing it is fast enough. And if you look at the Louis Rossman Channels it seems newer MBP just aren't built the same. It may be worth looking at it again I 2025. How little ( or big ) the past 10 years of Laptop has changed.
May be time to look for a new MacBook especially when all of them now has 16GB memory by default.
I couldn't understand how a 2022 device would run so much worse than 2017 device and assumed it was faulty. Returned, given a replacement, same issue. It is quite literally not built to hand the heat from the Intel chip doing very minimal stuff. I refuse to use a laptop that sounds like a jet engine when Microsoft is doing basic background stuff.
Returned and ended up buying a used 15 inch T-type Thinkpad with an AMD chip recommended by Reddit for $500 NZD. Runs great, cool, and quiet. It's much bigger and bulkier that the Dell but I don't mind.
Note: Not a Thinkpad fanboy, work has given me an X1 Carbon that I dislike for the same reasons I didn't like the new XPS 13 - it's useable, but it's still much hotter and louder than I would like.
And then testing newer Linux distros is also not working with the nVidia K2000M discrete graphics system.
Am thinking it may be time to give-up, harvest the RAM, the SSD's and the screen and recycle the rest of this one...
So how to get Windows 11 running seems entirely off topic.
There is a very dire need to have those with hardware hacking skills assist the larger freedom software community in "liberating" newer machines.
Someone recently got Libreboot running on a ThinkPad T480
https://ezntek.com/posts/librebooting-the-thinkpad-t480-20241207t0933/Why the SD Card thing when you can just use the built-in OS cloud syncing capabilities in Windows or MacOS?
Also you can take my M3 MacBook Air 15" from my cold dead hands. That laptop is ultra-lite, perfectly quiet, and ultra-fast. Wouldn't trade it for a 10 year old laptop.
I'd be willing to bet your use cases and goals don't align with the author's. Which is fine, but remember the article is about why they did not why you must also be the same.