Hacker News Reader

I use a hp elitebook 8470p i got for 100 usd from some guys garage and it is simply amazing. No screws, not even one to get the bottom cover off! You just slide it off and bam, your cpu/heatsink, fan, ram, and hdd are accessible on pretty much the same layer.

My wife had a hp once that had the thermal paste dry up. To fix it would have required taking apart everything from the keyboard to the monitor clips, top and bottom. We just bought a new laptop.

There are some sweet spots of old laptops which are serviceable. Some are even Macs. There's also some which have an Intel ME which can be disabled. Some are even x86-64. Its getting less common though.

Lenovo ThinkPads at least up to the --30 generation are very repairable/user-serviceable, more so than HPs.

And, unfortunately, at least for certain purposes, X230s/T430s are the most recent reasonable laptops anyway: after that it's currently impossible to replace any of the Intel/AMD firmware with something inspectable.

I was also quite impressed by the construction of Dell's 2-in-1 devices.

So you mean HP isn't an alternative?