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This is a super-great article. I still have a bunch of old P60s and P61s I got for $100 each, a decade back, and (mostly) replaced the screen-backlight ballast. They did get unreliable after a while, freezing up at random times.

There is a place where you can get a completely new motherboard for a certain old Thinkpad model, that I think I will try.

My only problem with ancient laptops is that nowadays I need 32GB of RAM to run my VMs in.

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Just because you can technically run something on a device doesn’t mean it will be usable. A 12 year old Intel proc (even with 32 GB of ram) will feel extremely slow.

It didn't feel slow then. With an SSD, and lots of RAM (where that is possible), it will be faster than it was.

Jevon's Law makes modern machines as slow as the old ones, by loading them down with crap animation. Don't run that, and they get as fast as ever, which was plenty fast enough. Many of us have got used to Chromebooks with pokey ARM chips, and have no complaints.

It really depends on what you run though.

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