[Linux-aus] Inexpensive laptops (was: ARM laptops)

[Mike Carden]

I'm typing this on a circa 2010 Lenovo X201 laptop which I bought second
hand in late 2012. It has an Intel i5 M 580 (4) @ 2.667GHz CPU and 7728MiB
of RAM. By modern standards it's a tad chunky, but its keyboard is perhaps
still the best laptop keyboard ever made with proper full-throw keys.

Like many laptops did back in the day, this one has an external battery
that you can unclip and swap, with IIRC a couple of sizes available. The
original battery faded out a couple of years ago so I spent about AUD$90 to
have a new one delivered and it has been excellent.

The original 500G spinning disk was still working but quite slow when a few
months ago I spent about $100 online for a 1TB SSD which was a five-minute
swap.

Keen to experience what the Cool Kids are running now, I installed System
76's POP!_OS (a Debian/Ubuntu derivative) on the new drive and I am rather
impressed.

A quick look online suggests that ancient X201s are about AUD$100 at the
moment. Add a new battery and a new SSD and for around AUD$300 you might
get yourself one of the best laptops ever made.

--
MC
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.linux.org.au/pipermail/linux-aus/attachments/20231021/50ef5e69/attachment.html>