What will happen to old, used up, laptops which are not thinkpads?
Who is gonna use and preserve them?
Old laptops
Benjamin Mitchell
Lucas Long
I fill like the majority are in a landfill at this point unfortunately.
Gavin Powell
Plenty of people aren't just superficial hipsters looking for anything old with an IBM logo to show off on Jow Forums and Reddit. If the opportunity presents itself and it has some interesting quality, someone will appreciate it.
I personally mostly collect OmniBooks nowadays, Compaq made a lot of nicer high-end machines as well.
Lincoln Gutierrez
go down to the dump and ask if they know they have anything
save them, install gentoo, and resell them on craigslist for like $60
Thomas Ward
I have a digital Hinote VP
but too be honest most of them a failing and unless you got an electrical certificate or know how to solder.
I had to fully rebuild of a battery (which I have yet to do
A failed hard drive
Bad CMOS battery (which I can't find lol)
But i do like the compaq machines better because better screen and lighter.
Julian Garcia
Most of them are so underpowered as to be useless. And all software they ran can be emulated 100x over on a Core2 dumpster PC. I only collect machines that are difficult or impossible to emulate that run interesting software, like SGI, Sun, DEC, and Apple stuff. x86 hardware is just e-waste. The form factors aren't enough to make me collect it.
John Thompson
>using old computers just for the shitty old buggy software you can run in a VM
who actually does this other than retro gamer casuals
Joshua Edwards
>run interesting software
>Sun, DEC
Want to know how I know you're just talking out of your ass to be a contrarian?
Dominic Thompson
retro gamer autists
Based. I always scrap my old x86 machines (desolder every component possible and turn the CPU into a decoration). Emulation of early Sun machines is possible nowadays, though.
The hardware's nice, and OpenGenera first came out for the DEC Alpha. That's some good shit.
Oliver Nguyen
Plenty of us will preserve them, but far fewer will use them. Vintage x86 hardware is unremarkable and next to worthless.
Noah Clark
>The hardware's nice, and OpenGenera first came out for the DEC Alpha.
You realize the Alpha is just an instruction set and not a specific processor, platform, nor an entire computer in itself, right? Many Alpha machines were just plain NT boxes that couldn't even run DEC's own Unix flavor. All that aside, 90s DEC in general is pretty notorious for being pretty much next to worthless in terms of software availability beyond the same shit you can run on anything else, that community is even more comatose than HP-UX.
I really get the feeling that most of you guys who obsess over trivial shit like ISAs have never even used half of the hardware you fawn over to any significant or involved degree. If you're going to be narrow-minded and disregard a system just because of a sticker on the case, at least be consistent with it.
Adam Perry
I will protect them user. I already have a hoard of them in my dorm. One used to be my server, but the Ethernet port broke and I can't get some stuff to boot off of it. I have another one that doesn't boot properly either and a bunch others that have a whole host of problems, but I don't have the heart to dispose of any of them.
William Bell
i consider laptops with sub-35w tdp cpus with the same or more power as a 486 cpu perfectly usable
Isaiah Roberts
Anyone who wants to.
Between DamnSmallLinux, Debian, Slackware, LXLE and Slitaz, there is zero reason for them not to be useful outside of working with modern 10MB HTML pages. 32bit / x86 hardware has no real reason to be wasted or thrown out in the trash where it will just go out to pollute the enviroment. A light Gnu-Linux distro and non-shit software runs on it fine.
Source: me, who hasn't bought a computer in 7 years because modern tech has not given me a reason to upgrade.
Jacob Nelson
>not gentoo
dude what the fuck
Julian Jackson
To add onto this, the computer I slapped together for my mom is a old apple PPC box with a 500mhz CPU. It runs debian and she gets her email with it just fine. it's 2019 and 500mhz is enough for her.
I have another apple PPC laptop in my closet that runs debian and acts as my I2P torrent seed box plus it has a IRC bot running on it for the #Jow Forumspunk channel on Rizon. It's been running for like 2 years without reboot and it's fine. There's literally zero reason to throw old computers on the trash heap.
Evan Green
a gentoo is fine too.
Christopher Gutierrez
>32bit / x86 hardware
Why the slash?
Connor Richardson
You know, or whatever you want to call it. Why not?
James Wood
battery life and energy efficiency tho
Connor Ross
It should just be 32-bit x86. No slash. x86 is an ISA, independent of integer size.
Gabriel Harris
It's true that batteries die, but you can rebuild them too. The PPC laptop is statonary. A thinkpad I have I took the battery apart and frankenstiened new cells into.