It was my Plex server until earlier this year. It’s thick, it weighs over six pounds, it runs hot and even with a new battery it wouldn’t last more than a couple of hours.
I have a great Dell Latitude E6320. 8G RAM, i5 Sandy Bridge and 250GB HDD. It's basically a tank with Magnesium and Aluminum. It fell from 1.6m right on its VGA connector which was pushed inside, but still works.
First thing I did was installing Ubuntu, though. Same as my desktop Dell.
PS: It's the only computer that gets WiFi while all others find it too weak of a signal. I'm online while all my friends shut their laptops.
my private laptop is a Thinkpad T520. I replaced the battery four times now in some 10 years, I gave it a RAM boost a year ago... the marketing lettering is flaking off, and it has one small crack on a side where it made unplanned contact with a concrete floor - but the machine is working strong. They will have to pry that machine out of my cold dead hands should it not die before me. I run it under a debianesque Linux with i3wm.
Work laptop is a 2017 HP Elitebook. This thing is utter garbage. I'm not talking about the funny idea to add a display port instead of HDMI for political reasons - but it keeps overheating, it's fan is loud as hell's airport approach, and every once in a while, it randomly bluescreens - and needs some funky key combination during BIOS to become workable again. Once Covid is over and we're back in the office, this thing will get replaced. Windows 10, and sluggish.
I refuse to buy a laptop with no user-replaceable battery. I expect to need to replace the tires/brakes on my car, and I expect to replace the battery in my laptop.
If you keep your laptops long enough, you'll eventually have to deal with replacing a battery. My two-year old Dell latitude E6530 is solid (and admittedly heavy), with no noticeable flex. It has an easily replaceable battery as well as user-upgradeable RAM! I'd call it a well-made piece of hardware. I expect to replace the battery in the next year or so (the battery is starting to show its age by now, but at least it still works).
A bit off-topic: My previous laptop, a C2D Macbook Pro (old enough it had a replaceable battery) developed a swollen battery after 2 years. At the 3 year mark I had to open it up and replace a failed case fan (and a hard drive). Also, the optical drive failed within the first year, as did its warranty replacement. I eventually gave up on that (and removed the drive so it would stop churning incessantly) and bought an external USB drive.
Maybe. That laptop is mostly used to watch Youtube and streaming movies and sometimes to do online shopping(she is using the company laptop for work, so no actual work done on this device since a year at least).
I haven’t worked with anything newer, but the late 2000s Dell Precision laptops are a true pleasure to work on — a great deal more pleasant than any Thinkpad I’ve cracked open. With just four screws I’m inside of my old M4400 and can pop off its heat sink, change thermal paste, swap CPUs, change wifi/Bluetooth/cell cards, etc.
Okay, anecdotes with anecdotes. The dell laptops that I've had (from the latitude series. That ugly gray one) have been sturdier than most bricks. I've dropped them on my wood floor, they've been tossed around in my backpack, had things spilled on them, and been abused in every way you can imagine.
They still keep chugging.
*When I'm talking about multiple laptops, I'm talking about multiple laptops within my company. Not my personal laptop [although I have had one]
I used a laptop made in 2004 that I bought in 2005 as my daily portable driver till 2018 lol. I still have it. It's a Toshiba Portege 3110ct that I added a USB2.0 PCMCIA card to, IDE SSD, and bumped the ram to 192MB. Ran a customized stripped down debian based distribution with a lot of customizing on my part. A USB wifi adapter. Has a 300mhz pentium 2 CPU. Did literally everything I needed on a laptop perfectly fine (ssh sessions, IRC, pandora streaming, light web browsing, note taking etc).
My current laptop is a ~10 year old Dell. Has a 4TB SATA SSD in it, 1TB secondary SATA SSD in the media bay using an adapter. I have two mediabay batteries as well as a BDRW drive I can hotswap whenever. Extended primary battery. 16GB ram, i5-3360 CPU. Express Card slot that I use with several adapters, USB3 ports, onboard gige, WWAN card, Wifi, BT, backlit keyboard..
If you aren't /needing/ the extra grunt of newer chips for gaming, video work, low latency realtime audio work, CAD, etc, or want the absolute best size to battery life possible, then there is no reason to not use an older system.
Oh, it has an NVidia 5200M 1GB discrete GPU as well as the Intel IGP and the NVS has taken a massive overclock without blinking when I do want to game and runs stuff like Minecraft and older AAA and even new independent games at playable frame rates without any issues.
Now, for /work/ I have a newer MS Surface Book that I absolutely adore. The battery life and display and portability are fantastic.
But it is my work laptop. Not personal. I refuse to buy a brand new laptop for home use lol.
I have a 2012 HP Elitebook 8560p I inherited from work decom that I used as my primary PC for about 4 years, and even now is my torrent client for public domain movies and is also my 'I guess I just need to use Windows' box after I built my desktop as a Fedora KDE box.
It is heavy, built like a tank, and has all the ports I still expect laptops to have (VGA, cat5, USB A, Optical disk) even when those ports are woefully out of fashion. The only problem is it's all PCI 2 SATA bus so even the cheapest SSD maxes out the system bus. She's starting to feel like flying an Excelsior class starship in the TNG era.
Today's laptops are sans optical disk drive, have lots more 'goodies' like IME and Computrace, have soldered ram (it about killed me to find a 360 degree hinge laptop 2 in 1 with AMD and unsoldered RAM, found one by HP eventually but still it shouldn't have been so hard), and generally are infected with phone-itis where everything has to be skinny, thin, light!! More than one micron thick? Old!
But for all that, said laptop is not my home server, nor are one of my many salvaged 'just in case I need a home server' laptops sitting on my shelf in the computer lab.
Instead I have a random cubicle farm Dell SFF PC that runs my home server, does fine until it randomly locks up, probably overheated Mobo like the OP has mentioned as probable symptoms, mostly because I don't want to play with the configs again! It's all undocumented and manually configured and I haven't put in the work to clean it up and put the configs into nixos or config management yet.
The moral of the story is (I guess) to use config management else all of your computer hardware hoarding may be stymied.
It's not supposed to replace your laptop. It's meant for those times or places when the laptop is too cumbersome. Anyone who has a laptop can tell you those situations are plentiful.
My existing laptop is only 6 months old, so no. But I would consider this device when I'm looking to purchase a new laptop (and would have considered this device had I known about it 6 months ago).
I can’t say enough good things about dell latitude. It’s to the point that they are all I use. You can get a great laptop for ~400 on eBay and when stuff breaks or wears out you can actually fix it yourself using spare parts that are easy to find
Also the dell outlet still gets some 4:3 16x12 "workstation" class laptops in in 2011 (albeit, from a few years ago) - so it really wasn't impossible to find them in 2007.
What I really wonder about is a guy who is a technology entrepreneur and goes 6 years from 2000-2006/7 without replacing his laptop. Check out the specs for the Inspiron 8100 he was using: 8lbs, P3 1.1Ghz, 128MB RAM, 48GB disk (as reviewed in late 2001).
I'm using a Dell Latitude E7440, it's about 3 years old, and I carry it everywhere. It has a few dents here and there. I've gone to the pub with it a few times and only God (and Google location services) know how I got back, luckily with the notebook still in my backpack, and the backpack somehow inside my place.
But of course, soldering them in is not surprising. It cuts costs. A lot I guess. You need less connectors, you need less time assembling the laptop, less time supporting the very rare cases when there's a problem with the RAM.
No. My wife has one. It doesn't even run YouTube anymore. Old laptops were a lot sturdier, though. Hers has outlasted about 3 of my high end ones. Good luck finding replacement parts, though.
I don't know. I have a couple of old Dell laptops that still work fine, a 2008 Core 2 Duo Latitude and a 2010 1st gen Core i3 Alienware M15x. I didn't even bother to replace the HDD or upgrade the RAM, just switched them from Windows to Debian.
https://www.cnet.com/reviews/dell-latitude-e6500-review/
It was my Plex server until earlier this year. It’s thick, it weighs over six pounds, it runs hot and even with a new battery it wouldn’t last more than a couple of hours.
What’s the point?
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