New old laptop

Usually around this time I was posting Holiday wishes nobody cared for, so this time I decided to share something else. 

Old Thinkpad R61i, yes, it still has marketing stickers

I was visiting my brother, who asked me to help moving stuff to his new laptop, something I promised to do in March, but we both didn’t have the time at the same time. no better time than a weekend before Christmas, right? His wife wasn’t too amused. It took a while, but we managed to do that without too many issues which was surprising since his old laptop was in two pieces already. Soon it joined his pile of old laptops he somehow never thought to utilise, so I looked through it and I found this beauty. ThinkPad R61i. And it works! The WinXP installed on it on an ancient HDD took 10 minutes to boot up, but it’s understandable when it’s been shut down for 10 years.

Naturally I replaced the drive with a standby Debian SSD I keep for diagnostic purposes and it works like a charm. Full $Gs of ram, 3:4 display ratio with an amazing 1024x768p, but it managed to open a youtube video. And let me tell you, those speakers are way better than what I have in my modern HP “gaming” laptop. 

 

I don’t know what to do with it yet, for now I need to scavenge for a working battery, since the current one dies after 15 minutes, but other than that, it’s a pretty good machine. I think I’ll keep it around with some lightweight Linux for quick checks as a local network terminal. 

Speaking of local networks, stay tuned, I’ll be upgrading my cobbled-together servers and documenting the process as I go.

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