I've had to stop looking for CPLs lately for lots of really poor reasons: food, fuel, the farm, and other stupid stuff. The poorest reason is that I have to replace my vintage Lenovo ThinkPad R50e running XP. It's on its third hard drive, third batter, and there's a huge hole in the bottom that I'm not sure how it got there. Seeing as how I got it in may of 2009, I suppose that I've gotten good service from it. (I like Lenovos since they are tough and affordable). So, instead of a CPL(head hanging in shame), I'm opted for a factory recertified Lenovo ThinkPad T420 running Windows 7 Pro. Now, before you snort, I'm aware that Lenovo does not recommend that this machine be upgraded to Windows 10; HOWEVER, there are enough testimonials on the web from folks that have done it that I'm willing to take the chance. The worst thing that I've heard is that the fingerprint reader doesn't work, and I don't care. Yes, I will image the HD before attempting to upgrade it. So, that is my pathetic reason for not participating as much as I would have liked. Food. Fuel. Farm. Wife (did I mention my wife?) And I needed a new computer. With sincere regret, Neighbor Al (AKA: Geeky old git) P.S. BTW, the T420 cost $200US, and I also managed to find a rebuilt IDE HD for the house server for $17US. Let's see if it lasts a year...
IBM/lenovo was my go to brand until I stumbled across HP Elitebooks, the magnesium/aluminium chassis is nice and surprisingly for an HP product I've had no issues. I too will be buying a 'refurb' this year from the same line as my current laptop, probably the 8770W, nothing really compares in performance for the price. Too many laptops are ultralight plasticky low power things, I want a desktop replacement. I am also avoiding installing that piece of spyware, though it has tried to install itself on one occasion. There are features I would like, but until the data collection I can't opt out of stops, Win 7 Stays. I have a nice piece of software on my rooted Android Phablet which feeds useless data to applications I don't whitelist. Give me something like that for Windows 10.
Hello Al, the older Lenovo computers are well built and my old mate Les has an older Lenovo/IBM laptop which he was still attempting to run on XP, but it was barely working, so i installed Linux Zorin 9 on it and it's working well again. I have installed Linux Mint on all of my older computers and so far they are working well. I do have Windows 10 on my main rig and it's working fine so far and it is possible to switch off features. Just go into settings and then click on the privacy icon and then go through the list and switch off the features which you do not want, Jeff.
Al, have you tried a SATA to IDE/ATA adaptor, I used some for years when motherboards started coming with just one or two IDE/ATA sockets.
Jeff, yes you can set the telemetry sent back to 'Basic', but the information collected is still too much for me, only the Enterprise Edition actually offers a telemetry option that doesn't transmit user data. Al, I hope you enjoy your new laptop, the T420 is a very capable laptop.
Yes, I have used one in the past. It was the boot drive that failed, and for $17 I'm I reasoned that the IDE replacement would be fine until I just go in and replace the whole shebang. I have a RAID controller in there with two SATA drives attached. I can't remember how I set it up, so that's why I'm slow to abandon it. I'm likely to move the RAID function to a dedicated device and spare myself the grief.
Hello Jeff. I'll likely put a version of Linux on the old laptop since it's doing well (besides the hole in the bottom). I have a mate that's a Linux guru, so I'll let him choose the flavour since I'll likely be asking him to help me maintain it over time.
Thanks for that vote of confidence for the T420. The only non-Lenovo laptop I've ever had was given to me, and it has been a disappointment. Other than durability, I really have liked the feel and action of the Lenovo keyboards. Probably a legacy inheritance from the IBM days when Selectric typewriters were the finest in the land.
The machine arrived and I think I got lucky. The packing was battered and amateurish. It appears that being a Microsoft Authorized Refurbisher doesn't mean squat for quality control. In fact, Microsoft has a list of questions that you should ask your refurbisher to see if they'll meet your expectation. It turned on, and I was surprised to see Chrome on it (non-Microsoft). Also surprised to see the profile of the previous owner still there (no data). Went to do updates and got a notice that the O/S did not appear genuine. WTF?! Appears that the refurbisher didn't enter the refurbish key code and activate it. Then I find out that the image was over 7 months old, so 128 updates later... I figure that I've got about six steady hours of work into it to bring it up to snuff. Well, I did save money on a nice machine. So, caveat emptor. I can ONLY recommend a factory refurbished machine if you expect any level of professional quality. I'll be migrating my email and local files over later in the week, and then I'll start using it as my primary machine.
It's running well, and I have memory on order to bring it up to 8Gb of RAM. Office 2007 is in, Firefox is in with my old profile, anti-virus (AVG) is in, and I'm left with recreating my desktop on the new machine. Oh yes, and a LOT of music files. Kind of like moving an entire house!
I have the T410, in fact I'm using it at the moment. Got it cheap, upped it to 8Gb with second-hand DIMMs, pulled the optical drive and replaced it with a 1Tb HDD, replaced the primary HDD with a 250Gb SSD and now it's a fairly nice little machine for the uses I intend (general web surfing, watching streaming video and performing DJ sets live). Lenovos are tough(ish), (relatively) high specced and look like they're twenty years old, so are (again relatively)safe from theft.
