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Comment by aortega | Hacker News Reader

Thinkpads do not break, they accumulate. At any time I have 3 on the house, use them as media centers, donate them to mom, etc.

Currently on a W540. Not very happy, but after some configuration is passable, cool and fast. Quality should be on par with others, maybe better.

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"Thinkpads do not break, they accumulate"

Excellent quote. We have four in the house at the moment but I'll be donating two to my sister's favourite charity over the summer. I use ex-corporate recycled ones and the X60s are showing their age a bit.

UK: An ex-corporate X200 from one of the big re-furbishers comes in at around £90 delivered to your local Argos. Debian has no issues apart from the need to install non-free wifi firmware.

Do you have a link to any of these Argos-delivering refurbishers?

Seller was newandusedlaptops4u

They are still doing them and still do the Argos thing

Use the ebay search term 'WINDOWS 7 IBM Lenovo X200 Laptop Core 2 Duo'

The URL is one of those very long ones with numbers in that never work properly. I got the 2Gb X200 one and it is fine with Debian SID and an encrypted hard drive (LUKS).

I killed a Thinkpad by dripping some water on it, just a couple drops of condensation from the outside of a glass of water. F1 key stopped working, the trackpoint mouse buttons started clicking constantly so I had to rip them off. The A key needs to be hit hard to work. The wifi constantly drops now. The only thing that happened was dripping some water on it.

Granted, it still works, just not well. However I have a pre-iPad Lenovo IdeaPad S10-3t that has seen pretty constant use as my daily driver Xubuntu laptop for almost five years now. I've probably put thousands of running hours on it and it still works like a (slow and ancient netbook) dream.

They're tough, but certainly not completely indestructible. I thought they were until the water incident.

The thinkpad line is modular and you can buy a keyboard and replace yourself. That's the trick of the long live of my thinkpads: spares.

I don't know if other notebooks has the ease of repair of a thinkpad. Maybe the Dells.

You may have gotten water into the circuitry of the keyboard, but that's its own replacable unit and has a tray (with the elsewhere-mentioned water holes) to protect the interior of the laptop. Particularly for intermediate models it may be worth picking up a replacement keyboard and dropping it in - not so sure if it's an old T60 or the like.

Yeah I'm comparing the cost of replacing the keyboard and the wifi card versus just donating it and getting a new laptop that doesn't have the Nvidia Optimus and some other features I'm not fond of (and a less power-intensive processor).

The keyboard and the wifi card together would only be like $60 though, which is really nice.

Which era of Thinkpad? Someone spilled a full glass of red wine all over my X31 while it was turned on and it was fine the next day (same machine survived much other abuse, including being thrown down a flight of stairs). That machine is still running and the keyboard is still better than even most of the newer Thinkpads.

You can probably buy a new kband wifi card for ~$50. One of my TPs is on its 3rd kb, and it's kind of cool to work on a fresh one when you replace it.

I agree that they accumulate, but not necessarily that they don't break. I've recently recycled a 600e (working), a T30 (working), and a T61 (motherboard dead). There was a massive build quality difference between the (brilliantly solid) 600e and the T61. I'm hanging on to an x61s for the time being, since it still works and it's quite small.

I still love the design ascetic of these laptops and I wouldn't be surprised to find myself buying one in the future.

Regarding build quality, check this:http://imgur.com/rqVgisL

Thats my W540, sans plastic covers. The inners are solid magnesium.

The T61 was the first laptop I bought and it completely put me off of Lenovo. Complete piece of shit -- broke multiple times even after I had them repair it and I even waited like 4 months for my order to arrive because they had some sort of manufacturing problems.

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