The Thinkpad x200 series is a line of laptops that I have liked for a while, but have never owned. I have a ThinkPad R40 that has a non-functional battery and I quite like using it, but it was too bulky to bring anywhere and its lack of a functional battery meant that if I wanted to take it anywhere then I would be tethered to a wall outlet. I decided to go for a cheap Thinkpad which has the old-style keyboard as I am not a fan of the rounded bottoms of the keys on the newer machines along with the shallower travel. I also did not want a laptop with a trackpad as that would mean that I would default to it over the TrackPoint as I would use whatever I am more used to. I decided on an original Thinkpad x200 as this would be a very cheap laptop to buy whilst still having a chance at being capable of browsing the internet. Hoping on trade me (New Zealand’s version of eBay or Craigslist) I was only able to find replacement batteries, but no Thinkpad x200, I then resorted to Facebook Marketplace which had one for NZD 100, which was a bit too much especially since it did not come with a battery that held a charge. I got the guy down to $80, which allowed room for a new battery.
When I finally got it home after driving halfway over Auckland, I needed to give it a clean. It was full of cat hair despite the previous owner not seeming to own a cat. Anyway, I opened it up and cleaned the inside (These machines are very easy to take apart) and applied the new thermal paste to ensure that I get all the performance that I can on this 14-year-old laptop. I also put in an extra 4GB of RAM to raise it to the maximum of 8GB, I also added in a 512GB SSD that I had lying around. This brings the 14-year-old Thinkpad x200 up to par with low to medium-end laptops that you can buy today.
Next is the operating system, for this ThinkPad, I chose Fedora Linux with i3 as this is quite a low-end machine, thus the i3 window manager I was going to use this machine for school and university so I did not want to have to reinstall arch if something broke and I was in a hurry. I quite like the package manager that comes with Fedora. I also installed nushell for my terminal shell and Nixpkgs for an additional package manager.
So how is it using a 14-year-old computer? Well since I had done all the upgrades it’s quite good, most things don’t take any time at all to load and it only starts to slow down when running heavy websites (why on earth do some pages have hundreds of lines of JavaScript?) or running blender. But for notes and general web usage a computer from 14 years ago is fine to use.