Can Linux save this old laptop from obsolescence?

Today, I'll be attempting to revive this 16-year-old ThinkPad with Linux. In doing so, I'll try to answer the question: Have computers of this age entered a state of complete obsolescence, or can they still prove useful for everyday tasks when paired with the right operating system?
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Excellent Video by This Does Not Compute that discusses the ThinkPad X61 in-depth: • ThinkPad X61: The Subn...
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"Mining by Moonlight" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
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"Sidewalk Shade" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
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"George Street Shuffle" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
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"Shades of Spring" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
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[@DanielBrotherston]

Replacing the HDD with an SSD would do far more for performance than the 4GB of ram. That's by far the most important upgrade you can make.

[@joelcarson4602]

I know that most later model Core 2 CPUs had a 8 GB RAM limit, but 8GB and an SSD ( it's a SATA interface, right?) would make it seem modern with the right Linux install.

[@minmogrovingstrongandhealthy]

The problem is that if you want to go online there is so much bloatware on the web that basically everything eats RAM. I have 32 GB of RAM and with 10-20 tabs open it goes to 90% and sometimes crashes the entire PC on all browsers I tried it's the same. CPU is usually up to around 50% sometimes even 10% while RAM I am afraid that it will fry one day ... Ever since 2019 I kept updating my RAM but what I learned it's useless. There is so much garbage with lots of apps and websites running in background that all act like datamining viruses. Every time I start my PC I waste my time end-tasking bunch of s--t 1st before I can do anything ... Before 2019 I could run everything on a potato PC with just 8GB RAM and SSD. Today it's like I don't have any of that. Even now writing this message stutters like a mofo ... can't keep up with my fast typing at all text on screen lagging behind like crazy.

[@PeterGyorffyAchJaaa]

@@minmogrovingstrongandhealthy I have like 50 tabs open in Chrome on my 32GB Win10 PC and only 31% of the RAM is consumed - what kind of pages do you keep open to reach 90%?

[@PeterGyorffyAchJaaa]

So this. Basically I stopped watching the video at the point when he mentioned that he used a traditional HDD although an SSD would have been dirt cheap. Rule #1 with old laptops: get an SSD.

[@Winnetou17]

@@minmogrovingstrongandhealthy Dude, something is wrong on your end. Yeah, the web is bloated AF, but what you described is an order of magnitude worse than the norm. 32 GB of RAM is plenty enough for most people. I run multiple browsers at the same time (I'm a web developer), each with dozens of tabs, and still most of the time I'm at 34 GB out of my 64 GB. And I have other programs opened too. And I'm on Windows 10 too!

[@nitemanify]

The keyboards on these were amazing. You could type forever on them and they just felt great. A hidden benefit from older, less powerful hardware is since it's slower, you are limited in your multitasking and are basically forced to focus on what you're doing.

[@terrydaktyllus1320]

I still use a Thinkpad T22 from around 2003 with a Pentium III CPU running at 700 MHz with 512 MB RAM and an IDE SSD on which Gentoo Linux is installed with an i3 desktop. A couple of times a month, I SSH into my home server to write BASH or Python code with a couple of terminal sessions open, I have my email open in mutt on a second desktop and a console music player going on the third desktop - with overhead left to run a few other things too. It has a great keyboard and it is just a very peaceful and distraction-free way to enjoy my computing occasionally.

[@a_nickname028]

i just never multitask myself

[@JessicaFEREM]

You can buy a desktop keyboard like the thinkpad, trackpoint and everything, lenovo sells them.

[@piked86]

Best method is to just not install a graphical environment at all. I understand that's not always an option depending on what you're don't ng but if you can do it it's great for avoiding distractions. Second best option is xterm in full screen mode. Alt+Enter and it goes borderless full screen.

[@andrewr7820]

Lots of good lightweight choices out there - Alpine, TinyCore, Slax and many more. It's been fun to watch computing evolve. I started in 1974. Yeah, I'm that old.

[@AndrewSchott]

Same here, in fact I still have a C64, 1040ST and a 2600 hooked up and use. Main rig is my RHEL/Fedora dual boot workstation. But those oldies are great. And another fella here that keeps hardware until the magic smoke angel takes it to hardware heaven. Linux and BSD make that possible while still staying current (SSL on ancient OSes is painful to make happen --- looking at you SunOS and Workbench).

[@ThePressurizer]

Then I hope you still have an old terminal and some punch cards!

[@tomatojuicetv9001]

Exactly what I dream of when I get old, be a tech veteran without losing his touches.

[@chris_schenkel]

Pong doesn't count.

[@terrydaktyllus1320]

You're only a bit older than me - I programmed my first computer back in 1983 on a college day release course with my first job in the telecoms industry. It was assembly language programming on a Z80 CPU. But I did maintain a very creaky DEC PDP-11 running RSX-11 in a customer's call centre for a while!

[@purplegill10]

I'm beyond thankful for lightweight linux distros because they saved my old 2012 laptop from becoming landfill. I had to move a few years back and I didn't want to rely on my phone all the time for media so I dug up my old inspiron from a decade ago and put in an old cheapo SSD I had lying around. Given that my financial situation collapsed in the 2010s I now can use that laptop as my TV, music player, and even a secondary PC when my friends need tech support. I legit can't imagine life without it and had it not been for enthusiasts' hard work I would've never been able to have the life I have now.

[@tomsun3159]

My daily driver is a 2012 T430 3rd gen i7 working perfectly at the same speed as my last company notebook with 8th gen i5 (both 4 cores / 8 Threads), the only benefit of the newer laptop was a better power efficiency. Even the 2nd gen i7 was equally fast, but has worse build in GPU. also the coreduo is working good with enough performance. The biggest problem you have with the old laptops is with the accu (no problem if used with the powerbrick anyway) and perhaps a weak bios battery. Push the RAM to the limit and if possible use a SSD and you will never understand why you needed a "modern" laptop. for 100 to 200$ (including all upgrades like RAM, SSD and 3rd party battery) you will have a powerful notebook with Win7, win 10, Linux or as a hackintosh. Don't forget to update your thermal paste which will be dryed out for sure.

[@TheBenSanders]

@purplegill10 hopefully your financial situation is better now!

[@lesscommonsense1804]

It’s amazing what an ssd can do

[@plasticfoodz6991]

My daily driver is a 2012 T430s 3rd Gen i5 running Windows 10. I also play some games on it too (3d AAA games up until early 2010s), I cap them at 30 fps because it only has integrated Intel HD 4000 graphics.

[@jesuschrist2284]

Back in two oh one two?

[@kelkilkat]

What made this video watchable to the end, for me, was the clear, slower talking, instead of the fast talking on most other channels. This is amazing for an older laptop to just use for linux, maybe an SSD would make it even more useful. Great video

[@rubyvolt]

I just put Linux on an old 3rd gen CORE Pentium laptop with 8GB. It is doing great at college for the web based stuff he has to do.

[@emdotrod]

I just bought the X220 for the price of $15. It's in the rough shape but it's still functional and just needed a keyboard replacement. I put whatever SSD and RAM I have at my disposal and with $30 I have a very functional laptop that I can use whenever I need a Windows/Linux machine (I use Mac as my daily driver). These old computers really don't deserve to be on the e-waste, they just need a better software to keep on chugging.

[@nfrcomputers]

I just bought a t480 untested for $60. fingers crossed it works. even if it doesn't work it was still worth it, the ram and ssd alone are worth 60

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

The X220 is basically in a perfect spot. in 2011 it already had very modern hardware, supporting modern OSes, but is still a proper business machine that can be user serviced.

[@danielshapiro5475]

I watched this video and expected to see 500k - 1mil subscribers. Very high quality video and editing. Great job!

[@TheBostonUrbanist]

Thnaks!

[@benbork9835]

This year KZbin startet to recommend me small channels like these more often and I love it because there are a lot of gems

[@minmogrovingstrongandhealthy]

Everyone needs to start somewhere also there is the factor of luck too. Years ago I use to be a partner and while YT promised me promotions I got nothing, matter of fact my subs didn't even got notifications of my activities and sometime even crashed the page when they clicked on my video or channel. It's like I was shadow-banned. Other friends reported the same things. To the point all smaller channels basically got erased out of existance. We use to actually make content and got nuked while some reaction bots and other nonsense people were spammed everywhere. YT spammed those more so as bots spammed them too. Most of the channels today that have millions of subs are all thanks to bots and not real people. Usually 100k or even bellow are people the other numbers are bots and or dead accounts. The view counts are also fake.

[@adibemaxwell6111]

Void Linux is a solid choice. My T420 uses Void Linux and I've never had an issue with it. Ever. Once configured, it just works.

[@damientjeh]

hows the battery life? im thinking about installing void on my x1 carbon

[@adibemaxwell6111]

@@damientjeh Well, this t420 came with an old, original battery and it still holds nearly a 2 hour charge under basic use; watching YT videos and such.

[@damientjeh]

@@adibemaxwell6111 thats great

[@piratasdecordoba]

I would also like to mention Puppy Linux. It is available as 64 and 32 Bit version and runs fine on almost any old hardware, e.g. on the small netbooks with Intel Atom CPU and 1 or 2 GB of RAM, which are otherwise almost useless today. Use it on my Lenovo Ideapad S10 with a 256GB SSD and it works perfect.

[@Flash1857]

Agree, Puppy Linux runs on lots of older hardware

[@MetalTrabant]

Tried Puppy on an old Asus EeePC, and while it worked from a USB, it didn't when I installed it for some reason. Had to find a lightweight homebrew XP for that one...

[@gattiger91]

Thanks for doing this. It’s nice to see getting more use of older hardware and keeping it out of landfills.

[@GroveErasmus]

I installed Linux Mint 21 (2022 version) on a laptop made in 2006. Fortunately, the laptop had 4Gb Ram, SATA, and Gigabit LAN. The only upgrade required was a SSD. Linux Mint installed and updated like a dream. Job done 10/2022.

[@vha1207]

I really like this form factor, I wish laptop manufacturers made more like it. The closest things I can find on the market today are 3:2 ultrabooks but these always lack ports and are not upgradeable.

[@TinkerCrunch]

There is something so satisfying about these very simple and casual videos that is just so bingeable!

[@SantiagoSalse]

Thanks! First time seeing your videos and has a short, precise, calm environment Real life tests, real life use cases, not only based on using 100% of power all the time Subscribed!

[@JB-wi7kr]

I wish that Lenovo (or anyone) would make new computers just like this.

[@youreyesarebleeding1368]

It depends on what aspects about the computer you like, but Framework makes a good laptop. You can swap the ports out on the side, it's very easy to repair and all replacement parts are available, and they released full board schematics as well as 3D prints so you could give the laptop mobo new life as a SFF desktop. They're coming out (or perhaps already released, I'm not up to date) with a new model that has 6 expansion ports, plus an additional large one on the back that could be used to install a GPU, more Battery, more Storage, or anything. There is also a third-party scene around making expansion cards for the laptop.

[@chadmasta5]

They do. Business laptops (like this one used to be) are very upgradable and use modern hardware. They're really expensive though just like this would have been when it came out.

[@MJ_M]

You really don't value a portable laptop being thin and light? Or the 16:9 aspect ratio?

[@Lolwutfordawin]

@@youreyesarebleeding1368 only having 4 ports on the framework is very limiting, my old 12" ThinkPad has 3usb 3.0, Displayport, VGA (that can go), Ethernet (surprisingly useful when working with routers and old tech as I do occasionally) a card reader and charge port, plus another 3 usb ports thru an expresscard expansion module. If someone came up with a dual USB A or C expansion card I'd be a lot happier with the framework concept, but it seems they sized it just barely too small for that :(

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

@@MJ_M There are other things besides watching movies on it.

[@staterbrosmilk]

I have one of these I use fairly frequently, personally im running mint on an ssd. The 4:3 aspect ratio makes it ideal for torrenting old anime and cable shows. It also proved a novel way of experiencing the SM64 PC Port. As you mentioned they work quite well for schoolwork. Glad to see some appreciation for these old machines

[@escapetherace1943]

I also have an oldass thinkpad for watching vintage anime it's so cozy, I happened to give it an IPS screen and while my modern laptop's color destroys it, the thinkpad is still great even though it's ancient

[@youreyesarebleeding1368]

I use rtorrent on one of my Thinkpads and basically use it as a seedbox in addition to just being a home server. I've never tried watching anything on it, because the display is quite bad, but is possible to upgrade. So, typically I just download stuff to it, seed for a while, and clone it to my main PC when I want to watch it. Do you have to worry about what torrents you download? I'm surprised that Thinkpad T-61 can handle the codec, will it work with h264 in standard def? What happens if you try to watch something like a 720p or a 1080p video in h264? I'm guessing h265 is likely out the window; although most of these old shows and DVD rips probably aren't in h265.

[@escapetherace1943]

@@youreyesarebleeding1368 idk man mines a 220, plenty of power to render 1080p video

[@fridaycaliforniaa236]

I still have my old Asus EeePC 904HD. It's slow asf but I put Xubuntu on it and it helps me wherever I go to fix other computers problems. It also serves me as a spare PC if I do something stupid with my main PC. I'm not a fan of Linux (way too complicated for me, I'm a Windows guy) but I have to admit it's very light and ultra stable. Perfect for what I do with it =)

[@jawjuk]

Great video of a valuable project. Old Lenovo ThinkPad bricks just can't be beat!

[@Amomo_io]

Congarts for the editing man ! You definitely deserves more subscribers !

[@meowwcat12]

Great video man this quality is what id expect from a channel with 2 mil subs

[@5argetech56]

In 2013 I got an Acer C710 Chrome book. I flashed the bios with seabios. Installed a 500 gigabyte Samsung Evo 960 Sata SSD, 6 gigs of ram. I use Bodhi Linux, with the Moksha desktop environment. Still using it in 2023. ♥️😊

[@noctarin1516]

Love the vid. Concise, straight to the point, and everything is clearly explained and elaborated upon. Love, from a 2012 Dell.

[@TheBostonUrbanist]

Thanks!

[@kgbfromwish]

idk why but since 2023 youtube started recommend me small youtuber and im glad of that, there is lot of good little youtuber like you, also im watching you on a linux mint, 13years old laptop (originally 2gb ram upgraded to 4) with intel pentium t4500 x), well thanks for this quality video, i hope you get a lot of subscriber, you already get me with this video ;)

[@anicalavera4]

Great video!! I have the same pc and was wondering what to do with it for a long time - this was super informative and gave me a lot of ideas, thank you so much!! :]

[@hkprime1213]

such a great informative video! looking forward for more ! 😎

[@64timothy121]

Nice quality video! Welcome back!

[@ThePuuFa]

These really were awesome machines and fun to mod too! My wife is still using my old X61s that I modded back in the day with a beautiful 1400x1050 IPS screen, a hidden dip switch under the battery to overclock the FSB from 200MHz to 266MHz when required, a modded BIOS to enable full SATA2 speed among other things and the usual upgrades like a SSD and 6GB of RAM (8GB would be the max). The most important upgrade (at least back then) IMHO was the screen because the original 1024x768 TN panel was an absolute deal breaker since I actually had to get some work done on it. The upgraded screen came from a X60 tablet and even to this day it looks just amazing :)

[@patw1687]

I upgraded a 16 or 17-year-old Dell. I replaced the hard drive with an SSD and upgraded the RAM to 4G. It's running the standard Linux Mint, and it runs quite well. Thanks for the video.

[@terrydaktyllus1320]

Absolutely. If you can pick up and old Core 2 Duo machine from 2006-2007-ish with a 64-bit CPU with 4GB RAM and an SSD containing Linux, it can be a perfectly viable daily driver machine.

[@lauriroberts322]

can you tell me how to upgrade my 2007 Dell Vostros 1500 with an SSD?

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

@@lauriroberts322 you take out the old drive and put in the new one. Obviously assuming it uses SATA, which is most likely.

[@Seacat17]

Linux is beautiful both for old and new machines. I have a laptop w/ Ryzen 5 5600H and 16 GB of DDR4 and this bad guy was CHOKING in Windows bloat. Have Arch on it now.

[@Moechella444]

I love how Void is slowly becoming the new Arch.

[@cfg83]

Great video! My friend taught me to make sure these oldies but goodies have 2+ cores for decent performance and you mentioned that right off the bat. My first choice for an older computer is Bodhi Linux because of it's EFL (Enlightenment Foundation Libraries) pedigree. Max out the RAM+SSD and you're good to go!

[@jayjay1598]

Great video - thanks for making this. Really pertinent and realistic points about how more mature ;-) hardware can still be useful when used intelligently with Linux and a lighter desktop. Classics! 🙂Very well made and watchable video too!

[@mek54]

I can't believe you don't even have a thousand subscribers! I really liked this video. Subscribed

[@reynoldsVincent]

Yeah great video and more testing than usual. I find collecting old ThinkPads is addictive and the most interesting ones, certainly the best keyboards, are on the older ones. They also have a fascinating design history throughout, even the later Lenovo ThinkPad products which continue high-quality design not always found on their other lines. After using SSDs for a few years I find mechanical drives more reliable if not too worn. Windows 10 is not too bad on some of the 2012-era ThinkPads. I have also tried the desktop ThinkCentres but they aren't as durable as the ThinkPads.

[@TwoDpads]

Just found this and this is amazing!

[@ltxr9973]

I still use a T420 (with a SSD). Perfectly fine for all my mobile computing needs, for more demanding tasks I'd want to use a desktop PC anyway. It doesn't even feel slow, XFCE runs great.

[@johnmadison3472]

I have a T420 and the keyboard is awesome. I wish Lenovo hadn't switched to the chicklet design.

[@ltxr9973]

@@johnmadison3472 That's true, the keyboard feels great, not nearly as fatiguing as modern style laptop keyboards. Sometimes I feel like modern laptops are too thin and elegant for their own good. Many have heat and battery issues.

[@pot3to444]

Haha yeah. I have a t430s and its great. I even dock it to use as a desktop. Cinnamon is fine on it and its what I'm currently using but I may switch to xfce just out of preference.

[@l3lue7hunder12]

I like using Lubuntu for these cases. It's current version is 23.04, based on Lunar Lobster, and uses the LXQt desktop. Also, it is well known that we hardly need current CPU performance for simple office applications, which is what gave birth to the Intel N* and *U CPUs that essentially are stealthy time traveling devices bringen the user back to the mid 2000's.

[@oldtwinsna8347]

The N95/N100 are about equal in performance to the I7-3770 from 2012.

[@l3lue7hunder12]

​@@oldtwinsna8347 Close to the i7-3770T, yes. But it was launched Q1'23 which means we are talking -11 years here. An example for 2005 would be the Intel Core Duo T2050, or 2008 the Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 - 255/342 to 1191/1237 CPU Mark. Intel sold that level of total performance until 2014 with the Intel Pentium N3520, and single thread performance until 2017 with the Intel Pentium Silver N5000. Another example of that range is 2015's "Intel Core i3-5010U" . That is 7 to 9 years back in time, and I am even ignoring the Celerons and Atoms there - New CPUs intentionally on the very low performance end ( and using misleading names hiding the fact on top of things ).

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

LXDE/LXQt and xfce are indeed incredibly lightweight, but still feature rich. Some of the ultra light environments take out so much, that it becomes hard to use them as daily driver.

[@Torpid-gw2ss]

This is such a good video My parents actually gave me an old toshiba satellite from 2007 with the same cpu as this think pad. This video has given me the inspiration to upgrade it and run link on it to do some typing and som programming

[@TheBostonUrbanist]

Awesome!

[@trustytrojan]

love the cinematic shots with the forest background!

[@rawmaterials3909]

I have a 15+ years old all-in-one pc with approximately the same specs. It uses manjaro kde with no problems. Plasma KDE uses up approx. 700 Mb. My mother used it for work and web browsing for more than 10 years. She even records audio with USB DaC and microphone. That's the magic of Linux. But Linux is not only for old pc revivals. Try it on newer hardware and it becomes a blast.

[@myfranci560]

How can you watch KZbin😅.

[@rawmaterials3909]

@@myfranci560 ??

[@myfranci560]

@@rawmaterials3909 ur so is lighter than youtube lol

[@rawmaterials3909]

@@myfranci560 ... and?

[@UNSCPILOT]

My Desktop PC with a Ryzen 5800x, a Radeon 5700XT, 32gigs of RAM, and 14TB in assorted SSDs and HDDs has been running Garuda Linux for well over a year and I absolutely love it, haven't bothered to open Windows 10 on the small old SSD it's still installed to for more than a few minutes just to convert a few files and swap back. Heck, I've enjoyed it so much I have Garuda XFCE running on my 2013 Laptop and even that old underpowered thing runs like a charm. I've had a handful of issues over my time as a new Linux user but nothing that I couldn't overcome with a little searching and patience, and were mostly brought on by user error, having backups accessible from the Grub bootloader has helped massively for this too as I can be back up and running to the point right before my mistake in less than 5 minutes which saves mountains of frustration I would have needed to deal with on Windows including but not limited to a full re-install

[@DerkerBluer]

Loved the video! Great work!

[@TheBostonUrbanist]

Glad you liked it and thanks!

[@aisle9]

I've got an X61 Tablet that I absolutely refuse to part ways with. It's a slightly slower T7700 CPU, but getting it to 6GB of RAM and a 240GB SSD turned it into something that can, like you said, really easily beat the plague of N4020-based 11.6" members of the Future e-waste of America Society. I've used a debloated Windows 10 on it successfully, but settled on Mint XFCE for the reasons you described, although I am kind of tempted to dig it out and give Void a shot now. That bump to 6GB was pricey, around $25 for a 4GB DDR2 SODIMM, but the added headroom was worth every penny. That's really what made Windows 10 usable.

[@_sneer_]

I’ve had an ASUs 11.6 N4020 laptop for about a year and a half now. It has some sort of Windows on a emmc but it is upgradable with NVME. I popped in some generic 256GB NVME and ran Kali Linux on it for over a year, but recently changed to Devuan and couldn’t be happier. Battery lasts for about 10h when I just browse internet and use it for programming and server maintenance via ssh. It is not my only computer, so for gaming or compiling I can use my i5-13600kf based PC. For the rest the N4020 is fine.

[@FailSonOfAnarchy]

Obsolete after 16 years? I'm sorry, I thought this was America.

[@terrydaktyllus1320]

Windows 10 is not usable. An OS that requires you to check and possibly re-enter your settings every time a Microsoft update is forced upon you is not one you can trust. Instead of fighting against Windows to de-bloat it, your time would be much better spent learning more about Linux.

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

@@terrydaktyllus1320 How well is support for BattlEye and EAC nowadays?

[@terrydaktyllus1320]

@@HappyBeezerStudios I've no idea what BattlEye is, I've never used it and therefore it's unimportant in my computer world to the point where I don't plan on spending time doing "homework" to find out what it is. If you want a better response to that part of the question then you'll need to provide more detail. The only "EAC" I know of is "Exact Audio Copy" which was a freeware tool that I used many years ago to rip CDs into FLAC format on Windows. I no longer use Windows and therefore don't use this tool either - there are perfectly good tools on Linux which do the same thing. Again, if that's not what you meant by "EAC" then you'll have to improve your communication skills and explain yourself better if you want more definitive and accurate responses from me. Over to you...

[@alessandromauri93]

"Better keyboard " I quote this so much! I sadly moved to a Chromebook from a Thinkpad T430 so I felt really the difference. I definitely took the Chromebook as a daily drive just for it's weight and better battery life (and the usb-c charger, but someone told me you can find adapters for most of the barrel jacks)

[@terrydaktyllus1320]

Chrome OS, like Google Android, just turns a portable computing device into a surveillance tool for Google.

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

Something I noticed with old laptops as well. Was setting up two old machines, a Dell Latitude from 2001 and an Inspiron from ca 2005, and the Latitude had the better keyboard and better display even after so many years of use. (Sadly it's other specs make it more than obsolete) Truly shows how well built those old business machines were.

[@earthchanger604]

Tbh when i first opened your video i was thinkjng ah another old laptop and a linux to renew it video what a new video idea but when i saw what amazing rhings you are talking about i was amazed by the amount of detail which you went over with each topic you speaked about. Amazing work keep it up

[@TheBostonUrbanist]

Thanks! Glad you enjoyed it

[@SebisRandomTech]

Looking forward to your transit content 😎

[@michaelpmalin]

I've watched about 1 minute of this video so far :). Amazing cinematography for a video about a laptop! Please upload in 4K, even if you don't film in that res. Since KZbin has introduced '1080p Enhanced Bitrate' regular 1080 looks like garbage. Uploading in 4K will force a higher bitrate and make your videos look much better for everyone, even non-premium accounts.

[@mateusgomes1086]

Great video. I have a T400 wich is almost equaly as old and it runs really well, and even better after I instaled an 480GB SSD.

[@mathman0569]

I used to use a laptop like that for a while, and it only had one GB of ram the three adtional GBs really helped it

[@k.b.tidwell]

Liked and subscribed. This moment I'm doing the final update on a new OpenSUSE install on a 2014 Acer C710 Chromebook. It's even weaker than the Thinkpad, so I think I'll spin up the Void image I have on my Ventoy drive and see how it compares. May be a reinstall coming! I knew I had the image, but had forgotten about the low resource usage. Thanks for the video! (Sent from my 2013 Thinkpad T430 running LMDE6!)

[@dingokidneys]

I have two old Dell Inspirion 1525's from about 2008 which run modern Linux fine. One runs Linux Mint XFCE and the other runs Kali (again XFCE) without problems. I did replace the HDDs with SDDs in both to get a bit more pep out of them and I upgraded the memory of one from 2Gb to 4Gb from another old dead laptop. Good experiences had for undemanding workloads.

[@worawatli8952]

Great video, I would put Linux on my old Thinkpad to use it again, it came with Windows 7 but somehow it got insanely slow after the last update. This could make it usable again,

[@PeBoVision]

I have a zero % attention span, but I always watch good content to the end to give the channel an analytics boost. I have a 25 year old HP/Compaq "laptop" with a "Made for Windows Vista" sticker. (The sticker no longer matches the OS). I autoboot into an Atari ST emulator, and use it as a16 bit gaming computer. It's a Core 2 Duo with 4GB of memory (DDR2, so going to 8bg is out of my snack bracket - at $200 to $500 for an 8GB kit.) but it works fine for emulating a 68000 based system. I never throw out old tech, India already has enough of our tech-waste (and the associated health issues effect us all). I always find good reasons to keep stuff. Hell, I still have my very first computer (a TI-99/4A purchased in 1982!) Gets booted up at least a couple times a week. Thrusting obsolescence on things that no longer suit their original build purpose, is a deficit of the imagination. (Pushing 70 myself, so that has particular personal relevance)

[@fluffybunny510]

This dropped almost 10 to 15 times from my bed over the year but still it survived with one inch and works to this day. I use it as a file transfer server

[@bryanmartin_]

Very nice video, man!!! I just subbed!

[@Xorgic_]

Void is one of my all time favorite distros, love that sudo xbps-install. Great video!

[@nacroni]

It's crazy as hell to see that you have only 706 subscribers! This feels back at home, with a ton of the good ol' tech essay videos about old tech being used in nowaday purposes, and it's shocking to see that you're so underrated!

[@floydlooney6837]

I bought a laptop in 2008, the HDD failed (Win Vista) and I got a new hard drive and installed Ubuntu Linux and used that thing as my only computer for many years

[@zloboslav_]

I have one of these, got it for like 25 euro few years ago! Runs Debian (Kali) great! Common issue is overheating WiFi module, which I removed and I just use a USB WiFi dongle. I put a cheap SSD in it and it is quite good. I may try Void, I like your results a bit better than mine. Nice video! :)

[@NeverlandSystemZor]

Linux put new life into my 2011 MacBook Pro that FINALLY in late 2022 stopped getting security updates and started to not be able to update LibreOffice or Firefox. It is AMAZING what Linux can make useable... I have a laptop that came with VISTA running Linux for the kids and playing retro games and it works actually really well for that and basic web browsing.

[@0w3nn]

You don't even need linux. Windows 10 runs just fine on these laptops.

[@MegaTerryNutkins]

I'm still using an HP NC6400 as my workbench laptop - it works, has a 900p panel for displaying schematics and YT videos and more importantly still works fine despite leading a tough life. With a lightweight distro the T2500, ATI X1300, 4gb ram and SSD are plenty fast enough.

[@andrewr7820]

The old Thinkpads had several standout features that still, to this day don't seem to have been emulated by other laptop makers: - Indestructible hinge design. Never breaks away from the base of the case. Screen stays in the position you adjust it to. - Pointing stick. I hate touchpads, then because they were garbage and now because I have a hand tremor. - Exterior of the case had a "rubberized" texture which made it easier to hang on to and less prone to skate off a surface to certain damage on impact. - Reasonable keyboard design. My 2cents anyway.

[@sp0el]

The problem with rubberized texture is that after a decade or so it gets all sticky. Not sure about ThinkPads, though, I had a Dell with that problem. Awful.

[@collodionpositive554]

Was a massive fan of the pointing stick on Thinkpads, but the trackpad on modern MacBooks is a winner, large surface and super accurate. Haven't seen anything come close on non-Apple laptops though. Even use the external trackpad on desktop over a traditional optical mouse now. The texture on Thinkpads holds smells really easily, which can be an issue with the used market of Thinkpads, very easy to tell if a previous owner was a smoker.

[@sarkybugger5009]

@@sp0el I have an IBM Thinkpad from 1998, and two Lenovo T420s from 2012, and none of them suffer from the sticky coating syndrome. I have plenty of other devices that _do_ suffer from it...

[@sp0el]

@@sarkybugger5009 Good to hear that IBM/Lenovo have some magic ingredient in their formula then. Some models still suffer from the stickness, as quick google search shows, though. And some people on YT use magic erasers and polish to restore their laptops. Didn't think about doing that for my Dell.

[@laurencejohnson4106]

A well presented video!👍👍Perhaps you could install an SSD., and make another video which shows how much the performance has improved. Linux Mint Mate version is my daily driver and I often restore and upgrade older computers and Linux gives them a whole new lease of life.

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

It shouldn't really do much with actual performance, but help a lot with perceived performance. GIMP won't apply filters faster, but it will launch and load images faster. Games won't reach higher fps, but navigating the file system will be much snappier.

[@cevmantius]

Thinkpads and linux. My fav duo!

[@hvanmegen]

Agreed.. mine too :)

[@crstn.s]

i also bought a x220i for 50€ last year for the exact same reasons - nice video :)

[@allyourmaze]

I have a Thinkpad X60s that I sometimes use to write essays in uni. It's a good tool that helps keep focus.

[@candidob8683]

Cool Video. And spot on by many points. Distros like Zorin OS Lite, Xubuntu, LXLE, and Lubuntu also come to mind.

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

I'm running debian with xlde on my webserver on a machine with 1 GB RAM. Impressive how light distros can be without taking away usability.

[@user-vo2lc5he9m]

Good video! I am typing this on my 2014 fujitsu lifebook with core i3 4th gen.i installed linux mint xfce with dual boot. i have a father who forced me to CS but never bought a good laptop instead i have this old machine.but im actually kinda happy cause i got to experience linux environment.

[@TheBostonUrbanist]

Nice!

[@JuzzyQ7]

It's still pretty easy to upgrade components on laptops. The surface pro for instance was soldered on a few years back but now you can upgrade it more easily.

[@viktorvondoom9119]

Just revived my old (2014) laptop using Zorin Lite. Watching your video on it right now! Im really excited! And this was also the most tech savvy thing Ive done haha

[@TheBostonUrbanist]

Nice! What laptop is it?

[@viktorvondoom9119]

@@TheBostonUrbanist Acer Aspire e5-571g. It had a black screen with moveable cursor when booting up Windows 10. Would freeze during re-installation of Windows 10 from the machine itself. Would freeze after reinstalling Windows 10 from an USB drive. Installed Zorin Lite from an USB drive and it runs smooth! Edit: btw its the i7, 8GB RAM, Nvidea 840m graphics card, and 500GB HDD (136 bad sectors, whatever that means) version

[@TheBostonUrbanist]

Glad you were able to make it useable again@@viktorvondoom9119

[@stevejohnson1321]

Helps a lot that this is 64-bit. You can run Debian on something older, but browsers etc. ore limited for 32-bit.

[@BWGPEI]

To further the idea - I put LMDE5 32-bit onto a ThinkPad T-62 laptop. This worked out very well considering the age of the beast.

[@MegaManNeo]

Whenever I use my old X60t it still does fine for all tasks you mentioned provided 32bit packages still exist. Unfortunately, the seller sold me the X60t as X61t back then and shortly after the shop I bought it from was no more. Oh well, it was my first real ThinkPad past the s10-3 which was around 2013 so I still had plenty of good years with it on Debian Squeeze and later Wheezy, then Kubuntu and now I just took an old SSD and made it a retro XP gaming laptop.

[@miskaknapek]

what an excellent video! many thanks for it! I do some data science programming, and I can see ust how mny numbers even older laptops can (still) crunch quickly. I don't think veryday people realise just how powerful even old laptops are. heavy operating systems and applications (cough...even webbrowsing..), however, do soak up a fair bit of the power that's there. writing this on a blazing 'new' macbook pro from late 2013 that shows no sign of slowness ;)

[@popliviustefan]

Hey! I actually did almost the same thing recently! I have a very old T61, one of the last models that still bore the IBM logo before selling the business to Lenovo. Laptop is still good hardware wise. Although it is actually made from 2 identical laptops, mine and the one my sister had. We both broke it, but in different ways. Mine had a hinge broken following a fall from the desk due to wire tripping and a bad cooling fan. My sisters' had a broken charge plug and a partially damaged motherboard. Back in the day you could open the damn device and swap parts. So, I made a good laptop from those 2. About 2 weeks ago I installed Linux Lite on it and works like a charm (albeit like a slow charm...)

[@hwertz10]

Oh yeah, I've put "full fat" Ubuntu 22.04 on a few older systems (I am using the "Gnome Flashback" desktop though, rather than Unity or whatever, it has a more classic appearance.) I'd say the realistic minimum is like a Core 2 Duo with 2GB RAM. Indeed, if you can get a 2GB system to 4GB do it, you'll run into swap pretty fast as you open a few tabs. The last C2D I set up booted to desktop in about 55 seconds off the HDD; you do end up with like 1GB RAM used at startup, but it can swap out about 600-700MB of that without any affect on the program you're running or the desktop. The battery life was brutal though, battery life went from 4 hours doing nothing to like 45 minutes playing a KZbin video since it was running the CPU fairly hard. I'll note, these old Intel GPUs run 2D and video scaling fine, but the 3D support a) was slow as hell on them anyway. b) dropped in newer mesa versions. In general, all pre-shader supporting 3D GPUs (the ones that only had "fixed function" support) were dropped recently; there is still a "mesa-amber" package where they branched off that last version of mesa that supported these and intend to continue to fix any bugs and security vulnerabilities that turn up in it. You get OpenGL 2.1 (but slow as hell) with the amber, or OpenGL 4.5 through llvmpipe software rendering with current mesa; the GPU is so slow that I actually found the llvmpipe to be faster (still bad but a little faster.) My dad runs this piss out of a Core 2 Quad desktop (Optiplex 755) with 4G RAM and a 1TB HDD in it. He makes heavy use of Chrome, edits like 100s of page documents with lots of graphs and charts in them, tons of scanning and printing, and weekly Zoom conferences. Zoom maxes out 2 cores by itself, but it's got 4 so it works out OK. That thing has some problem due to successive Ubuntu upgrades (I assume it's probably got bits of upstart, init, and systemd all taking up bootup time..) and takes something stupid like 3 minutes to boot, but runs fine once it's booted.

[@AlejandroRodolfoMendez]

Great video, I did something similar with a atom n270 and a celeron m 430. The more important parts is having enough ram and with a decent enough disc you can do it well too. But if you can put a ssd it would help on those parts that the pc isn't enough. I still have sata hdd tho. For me rasbian 32 bits worked. In the past I used also puppy and slax. Rasbian is simple enough for me.

[@GrdDog]

I love Zorin OS I purchase and upgrade older laptops; then install Zorin and donate the laptop(s) to different people, Zorin is more Windows based so people pick things up faster, I do spend sometime with each new user to linux and give them a head start, plus a few really good links to videos. This has benefited many that live in my area and now more people realize what can be done with a little effort and time.

[@edmund9492]

I'm still using R61 for internet (except streaming movies) and programming. Max 4GB RAM, SSD and new battery. SSD gave huge boost. OS is loading in 30s. Before, it was 1m30s. Still it can play movies in 720p and MP4 from SSD in 1080p.

[@Rusikulya]

What OS do you use? I also have a dead R61 and am considering to restore it

[@aricroy4258]

Great video man. Its thought out. I enjoyed it.

[@TheBostonUrbanist]

Thanks!

[@tuppytheducky]

Alpine on my Lenovo T60 is an actual joy to use, mostly for writing and watching some older videos

[@CosmicRider555]

I just recently helped a customer with a Dell Mini 2012 he had lying round. Single core cpu, 1 GB ram and 160 GB mechanical sata hdd. He just needed something to browse the web with and maybe watch KZbin with. After all the testing I've done in VirtualBox I decided on Bodhi Linux. It exceeded my expectations once we actually installed it on his machine. Would recommend. I think it would run even better on your thinkpad.

[@chitan1362]

What's kind of magical with Linux is that the open source drivers on Intel and AMD GPUs support Vulkan natively on some GPUs that don't support it at all on Windows. I have an old MacBook Pro from 2012 that I use for various things. MacOS is a no-go on it because Apple does not support it in any capacity anymore. Linux however works great (with a few easy-to-fix tweaks). Sometimes I will play some very light games on it such as Pizza Tower, and This old 3rd gen intel with iGPU works fantastic with DXVK.

[@gabiedubin]

It's not my attention span, it's the way this video is filmed, some videos are so bothersome to watch while in this video, everything just makes sense. great video.

[@abyssalproductions0]

I found an old Sony Vaio laptop from 2007 with an OEM edition of Vista. Installed a 32x Linux distro called Antix and now it works quite well. You can very easily breathe new life into these older PCs with Linux

[@0w3nn]

You don't even need linux. Windows 10 runs just fine on these laptops.

[@chovekb]

@@0w3nn BS.

[@0w3nn]

@@chovekb what are you calling BS?

[@memodump]

My ThinkPad 560 runs Windows 95 just fine, and the only real issue I have is inability to connect just about anything to its single USB port: even USB flash drive needs a software driver. Which obviously you can't find these days. Other than that, it is absolutely fine.

[@fercardonardenete3227]

Cool video, thanks

[@CrackDavidson1]

These are fun to tinker with and revive with linux. Theres a ton of games that can be run with these.

[@rodrigosoares1376]

I still using my old PC with a i3 3220, 8gbs of ram and a intel hd 2500. On windows the performance is not that good, so I've been using linux exclusively for few years now. Today I use Window Managers(Wayland compositors) and the experience and performance are amazing for such an old hardware. I recently installed cachyos and it made watching videos on youtube a lot better with less cpu usage, something that I could never figure it out how to make it work under vanilla arch even though I follow carefully the wiki. About gaming, I been recently doing a lot of retro gaming with retroarch and the performance its good on the majority of cores available, except PS2 core, but some games do work using the PCSX2 emulator.

[@0w3nn]

Weird, a computer with any i3 should run great on Windows 10. Have you tried an SSD?

[@manfromth3m0oN]

Love to see some interest in void. It's been my favourite distro for a good while.

[@zucchina24]

I like your video! I have a IBM Thinkpad T42p with Linux that I rarely use… I subscribe to your channel as the 1000th subscriber 😂 so congratulations 🎉 and keep going with the good content! Greetings from Switzerland 🇨🇭

[@TheBostonUrbanist]

Yooooo

[@alwaysright3943]

Great video laddie

[@pietropietro]

great video! Keep going :)

[@vpnconsult]

Love the X61 with its keyboard.

[@Engiduck]

I think mobile core 2 duos are socketed so it may be possible to upgrade it slightly. And it may have an express or pc card slot or maybe you could use the wifi card slot

[@SebisRandomTech]

They’re socketed on thicker machines like the T61, but the X series has always had soldered CPUs.

[@monochrome_linux]

@@SebisRandomTech yo even sebi is here! nice!

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

The T7100 in it came on socket P and FCBGA6. The first is socketed and replacable, the latter is soldered. But the X61 has two miniPCI express slots and a CardBus slot. There are even official wifi cards for it. Two of them even offering 802.11n Looking at the thinkpad wiki, there are BIOS mods that allow SATA 2 speed (which is there hardware-wise, but disabled by software), a CPU pinmod that allows up to 3.6 GHz (by running 266 MHz/1066 MT instead of 200 MHz/800 MT FSB) and one person even soldered a T9500 into it.

[@scotthayes5386]

A week ago i had never seen Linux before. I saw a yt video, and revived an obsolete 2014 mac air with Linux mint and it runs 10x faster than macos did with 4x the battery life after using tlp.

[@balderm001]

Last year i found my old school laptop (athlon64 with an old radeon gpu) at my parents house, upgraded the ram and disk to an SSD and it's now running 32bit xubuntu like a champ, and it was usable out of the box, no fiddling with config file needed like i had to do a few years ago when i switched my work laptop to Fedora 24, and wifi/bt refused to work without me manually fixing iwlwifi.

[@DeirdreYoung1]

I had good results with antiX Linux running IceWM on a similar old LG laptop - it feels a little bare but it works fine. I even added xfce4-power-manager to dim the screen :)

[@ozzyp97]

AntiX is awesome, it's just about the only thing capable of making old Atom powered netbooks somewhat responsive.

[@asland408]

Good review !

[@TheBostonUrbanist]

Thanks!

[@simonbaldwin8966]

Great reminder of what can be done with older hardware. Funny you should call it the antithesis of a MacBook as it was a direct rival back in the day and has a very similar spec to the 2007 MacBook I bought new. Void is a great distro. The PowerPC version was even usable on a 2005 PowerBook until they stopped maintaining it a year or so ago. Great video as others on here have said

[@TheBostonUrbanist]

Finding distros that support PowerPC is hard these days unfortunately.

[@simonbaldwin8966]

@@TheBostonUrbanist There is still Debian and Gentoo but Void ran really well as it was lighter that Debian but still had plenty of packages.