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Using vintage laptops in 2024: How do you make it work? (lemmy.world)

submitted 3 months ago by AusatKeyboardPremi@lemmy.world to c/thinkpad@lemmy.ml

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/18205906

I have an old ThinkPad T42 coming my way. I plan to use it alongside my daily driver mainly for reading, emacs, and retro gaming. I will be dual booting a lightweight flavour of Linux (TBD) and Windows 98 on it.

However, I am a bit concerned about its ability to handle today's internet, with all of its heavy websites.

I would love to hear from those of you who are still using old ThinkPads (or other vintage laptops) in 2024. How do you make it work? Do you use lightweight browsers, specific configurations, or lightweight websites to get around the limitations of older hardware?

Are there any specific tips or tricks you can share for getting the most out of an old ThinkPad on the modern web?

Looking forward to hearing about your experiences!

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[–] monovergent@lemmy.ml 4 points 3 months ago (3 children)

Assuming full GUI is preferable over CLI/TUI/tiling WM minimalism, as it was for me while toying with a 2005 Celeron laptop with 2GB RAM

Hardware:

Use a native PATA SSD
Take good care of the T42, it's relatively delicate as far as ThinkPads go

OS:

antiX for more packages and less configuration
Alpine or Adelie if you are more adventurous

Desktop:

IceWM (default in antiX), FVWM, and wmaker are all snappy enough
XFCE is marginal and will eat up a good chunk (~450MB) of your precious RAM

Browser:

Netsurf is workable but there will be sites that don't work
Librewolf with Javascript disabled by default (uBlock makes it easy to whitelist as needed) might do, but expect a severe CPU bottleneck
Security aside, surfing the web on 98 will simply be painful
I would also remote into my desktop's browser over LAN with either RDP or compressed X forwarding. YMMV if not over LAN

Productivity:

Modern Libreoffice unfortunately feels a bit sluggish on old hardware. Writing in plain text and making spreadsheets in Gnumeric might be a better experience, as it was for me

[–] AusatKeyboardPremi@lemmy.world 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

Thank you for your insights. I already have some of these items on my list such as trying out Antix, restricting Windows 98 to gaming, upgrading the hardware, lifting the T42 with both hands from both sides, etc.

When it comes to web browsing, I am starting to think as long as websites that offer long form reading content work, I should be okay. For every other website, I would rather use my daily driver. It would be nice if the boards and forums I frequent also work but I won’t lose sleep over it. Besides, I am using this opportunity to get back on IRC.

As for writing, my workflows are already based on plain text (org files) so I won’t be requiring any office suites. It is also an opportunity to test out my emacs configuration on a resource constricted machine.

If I may ask, how was your experience using the Celeron laptop you mentioned? Do you still use it?

[–] monovergent@lemmy.ml 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I wanted to see if having a dedicated low power writing machine with "emergency" internet access would help with my productivity. Also a bit of nostalgia as it was one of my first laptops. Nothing too remarkable about it as long as I kept to offline office tasks. But between the short battery life and the profound slowness of google docs (have to use it for work, ugh), I went back to using my X230.

[–] AusatKeyboardPremi@lemmy.world 1 points 3 months ago

I am having similar objectives as of now for the T42. I hope it goes well. Thanks for sharing your experience.