My 2015 ThinkPad setup is still going strong, show me yours

Thinkpad T430 here, 2012. The only part that is original is the case. Everything else has been swapped at least once, and it runs a minimal Debian install that boots in less time than my phone takes to unlock. My complaint is Wi-Fi: the older card does not like newer routers, and I eventually swapped that for a modern card.

The thing that will kill it is not the hardware, it is browsers asking for more memory every year. Check your tab count before blaming the machine.

I am a retired teacher and my laptop is a 2014 Windows machine my son gave me. It does email, photos and a few video chats with the grandchildren. I have never done anything to it except accept the updates. It is slow to start in the morning, so I make a cup of tea while it wakes up. Is that a sign something is wrong, or is that just what old laptops do?

Beth, a slow start on a 2014 machine usually means a mechanical hard drive, a lot of programs launching at startup, or both. It is a fixable thing, not a disaster. If you want, start a thread with the exact make and model and we can go through it.

Owen, good setup. One tip for the removable battery: if you leave the laptop on mains for months at a time, check the spare is not sitting at full charge in a drawer. Store it around half full, and check it every few months. See the plugged-in thread for the longer version.

Respectfully, a 2015 laptop is e-waste. No modern game will run on it and a Linux install is just a way to keep a corpse walking. Take the RAM and SSD out and put them in something that can use them. You are wasting a good SSD.

I use a hand-me-down laptop from 2016 because a student budget does not stretch to anything else, and honestly it does everything I need for classes. Writing, slides, library databases. Owen, how do you handle the Wi-Fi on that ThinkPad? Mine drops when more than a couple of devices share the router in the dorm.

@Kenji W. on the T450 I just use the stock card with a current driver, and I put the laptop on the 5 GHz network when the signal is good. If yours drops with many devices on one router, test it with a phone hotspot first. If the hotspot is stable, the router is the problem, not your laptop. There is a longer troubleshooting list in the Wi-Fi thread.

@Tyler B. the SSD is doing exactly what an SSD is for. A machine that boots fast and runs for a decade is not a corpse, it is cheap computing. Also, I have yet to see a game that needs a ThinkPad.