Is this too many laptops in your opinion?

[kfzhu1229]

Are they in working order? I mean, batteries are often an issue with older laptops.

Yeah I end up fixing just about every single one of them to be in working order, hence former glory.
And actually now most of them have working batteries, just some have quite short running times.
I have the easiest times getting the Dell latitude batteries because the entire C series share one battery, and D series batteries are quite easy to find locally and I just get some in good working order for like maybe 15 bucks each.
ThinkPad batteries are also decently easy to find, not as easy, but I managed to get most of them working batteries.
Then the HP Compaq business laptop batteries are the hardest to find, but luckily none of my HP's except for my Presario CQ56 actually have a defective battery, while the CQ56 is used primarily for Zoom in my bedroom so I don't care.

[kfzhu1229]

Well I guess it is time to update with a full collection of Core 2 duo laptops:



Sorry, there is only the ThinkPad T61 widescreen that's a ThinkPad out of this subcollection...
This is because just about all of these machines were at the verge of being thrown out and sold to me for prices of junk, but they turn out to be in fantastic condition after overhauling (without even spending money on parts unless I absolutely have to). And you know, it's not that easy for people to throw away ThinkPads as junk as opposed to a lesser known HP Compaq or Pavilion model, and 4:3 T6x's are all pretty much priced quite a bit beyond what I am willing to pay.
For instance, in a lot where I purchased a Latitude E6500, Vostro 1510, XPS M1330 and Pavilion dv5000 (C$20 each for the Dells, $15 for the HP), there are also ThinkPads in the lot. But well I reached out to the seller within just 24 hours of the ad being online on Kijiji marketplace, and the ThinkPads are all gone... Now I snatched up all the Dells that are worth saving, and he's left with a bunch of well beaten up Toshibas and Sonys and lesser known brand like Fujitsu Siemens, and a bunch of laptops with snapped hinges or missing keys

[kfzhu1229]

Well and now I have to announce the death of the T61... This is probably not surprising, but this is one more victim to NVidia GPU Failure.
I let it reinstall Windows and then I went outside, and then when I came back, I was met with a blank screen. Then I restarted it, it worked for a while before starting to glitch out.
Now, if you turn it on, it might work for like 5 minutes and then the GPU craps out.
I have a feeling it might have been accelerated with using thick Thermal grizzly paste on this heatsink and the heatsink has this insane design of not having screws that directly screw it down to mount on the GPU!
I guess at this point, if anyone is interested in using it for parts (perhaps for its WXGA+ screen which is still in great condition), let me know.

[RealBlackStuff]

Bit OT, but I have given up on Thermal Grizzly already.
I started with Hydronaut and was quite happy.
Then I 'up'graded to Kryonaut, but that 'improvement' didn't last very long.
As soon as a temperature of 80 Celsius (or more) is reached only once, the effectiveness of Kryonaut goes downhill fast!
Didn't have that problem with Hydronaut, but I no longer have that.
I then switched over to Phobya NanoGrease Extreme, but as good as it is, it is rather difficult to spread evenly, even after warming it up before use.
I'll stay with it for the time being, until it's used up.
After that? We'll see.

[wujstefan]

After that? We'll see.

I can recommend Noctua NT-H1 - am using it on quite a couple of my systems and it does great job. Easy to apply, and lasts for (at least) 3 years - I have used both TG, AC5, AAB different inventions, but always got back to NT-H1. Did some ccomparison tests that were especially important on R61"p" project, and it turned out that actually this may not be the most _effective_ one, but definitely the most stable out of everything I have used. It simply keeps the job done for a very long time, and this is super-important to me when working on many systems.

[RealBlackStuff]

Thanks, the newer Noctua NT-H2 is already on my 'next-list'.

[kfzhu1229]

As soon as a temperature of 80 Celsius (or more) is reached only once, the effectiveness of Kryonaut goes downhill fast!
Didn't have that problem with Hydronaut, but I no longer have that.
I then switched over to Phobya NanoGrease Extreme, but as good as it is, it is rather difficult to spread evenly, even after warming it up before use.
I'll stay with it for the time being, until it's used up.
After that? We'll see.

Well I don't have much of a choice either. 3 years ago I bought like a giant tube of Thermal grizzly Kryonaut that's like 10ml and I still have something like 2/5 of it left!
The Kryonaut is almost impossible to spread, it just rolls into a ball and sticks to whatever spreading tool that you use (even if you use the preincluded ones, which btw is very inefficient and makes you waste lots of thermal paste)
I am curious though for something like the Core 2 duo X9000, how does the Kryonaut stacks up on there?
So far I have no issues with mine with the Core 2 extreme X9000 with the Kryonaut, but then I also cleaned the heatsink pretty frequently (just 1 year and then the fan is full of dust) and the Dells don't overheat as much as the T61p with graphics at higher TDP ratings (provided that you replace the thermal pad with shim + paste if you have that for the GPU).

[kfzhu1229]

Well I also had my hands on a HP Compaq nx6110, which is like the ThinkPad R52 series in price and performance but 15" T43 form factor.
It also unfortunately has the exact same fate as the T43 motherboards: failing southbridge...
On inspection, I guess it makes sense because the nx6110, exactly like the T43, has quite horrible chassis flex near the front in also the front speakers, and the southbridge chip also happens to be at the exact spot!
This is a shame really, as then the ugly Latitude D610 and D810 are the only high end ones immune to this problem, thanks to a magnesium frame inside that runs over the front as well so it doesn't have as much flex.
Also interestingly, the the Compaq nx6110 despite having the Sonoma platform with a Pentium M 7x0 series CPU, uses the older DDR RAM! I never knew that Intel actually made a chipset that supports the 533Mhz FSB but DDR RAM

[Placeholder]

It also unfortunately has the exact same fate as the T43 motherboards: failing southbridge...
On inspection, I guess it makes sense because the nx6110, exactly like the T43, has quite horrible chassis flex near the front in also the front speakers, and the southbridge chip also happens to be at the exact spot!

I keep reading about T43 models having catastrophic failures. This south bridge thing, a chip overheating because of the wifi card, GPU failures, fan and heatsink issues... what else? Is there a resource somewhere listing all the main issues an how to prevent them? It doesn't seem like much but I really appreciate people like you posting about this, just out of the blue. Maybe I'll be the one who ends up piecing everything up and doing the resource, who knows lol.

The 15" T43 with the 64mb gpu I'm currently running has a dead bios battery and it shuts down or freeze if I put too much load (bloated websites or video games). I'm getting a 14.1" T43p this weekend as an upgrade (and maybe a frankenstein project?) and I would love to get the thing squeaky clean and sturdy. I'll post about my shenanigans in the T4x section once I get into it - I've been busy with my halloween costume...

At the height of my 'hoarding' I had 42 Thinkpads.
Today I have only 6 4 left (1 each T23, X1, X240, X240s, X250, T440p), the rest has all been sold.

I once owned 64 distinct GameCube controllers, all different variants including a prototype. It happened to line up with the pandemic shutdown and I wrote a full documentation of the thing and then sold my entire collection. This is the thing that got me over the edge regarding keyboards actually lol. And I have one old, beat up silver controller left that I use to play super monkey ball. The bad variant with the undesirable stick mechanism.

It may look absurd from outside but it's by owning things that you get the chance to learn about them. so yea, that shelf can definitely fit a few more laptops...

[i love old thinkpads]

Sorry for necro-posting, I know you are busy taking care of grandkids and cashing in social security checks by now
Hopefully you still still see this

No amount of old $50 2000's laptops is enough. Even if you have 20 of them, they still cost less than a MacBook combined, and they are laptops, so they don't take up too much space
You can still get good use out of C2D's and late Pentium laptops with Linux. I find the T60 to be perfectly usable in the current year, even though mine only has 2 gigabytes of RAM. I use my computer to browse the web, watch YouTube, read stuff, and memorize things, so I don't particularly need a NASA workstation . Heck, even if you needed to do things such as compiling programs or gaming, mid 2000's ThinkPads with a high-end CPU and dGPU should be good.

[unix_joe]

Sorry for necro-posting, I know you are busy taking care of grandkids and cashing in social security checks by now
Hopefully you still still see this

No amount of old $50 2000's laptops is enough. Even if you have 20 of them, they still cost less than a MacBook combined, and they are laptops, so they don't take up too much space
You can still get good use out of C2D's and late Pentium laptops with Linux. I find the T60 to be perfectly usable in the current year, even though mine only has 2 gigabytes of RAM. I use my computer to browse the web, watch YouTube, read stuff, and memorize things, so I don't particularly need a NASA workstation . Heck, even if you needed to do things such as compiling programs or gaming, mid 2000's ThinkPads with a high-end CPU and dGPU should be good.

What OS are you running? I've found that my preferred OpenBSD is often too slow on these C2D machines any more, for general purpose browsing or even using software written with a modern toolkit. It's been off to the races ever since GTK3.

I have some ideas on a lightweight minimalist desktop based on sway and Wine and running older Windows applications which may actually be more performant on older hardware.

You're right that they take up very little space but also at this stage in life with three little ones, I don't really get to enjoy them either. They just sit in a box. I think I should just sell them before the plastics are damaged any further due to age and time. There are probably a dozen laptop computers in a plastic bin up in the attic. I feel weirdly guilty for holding on.

[i love old thinkpads]

I use main stream Linux flavors which are often times better optimized and less buggy than the BSDs. Unique != good, actually it kind of means the opposite. Don't use any of the noob distros! This isn't an elitist thing, I want a just works Windows-like experience as the next guy. Often times noob distros aren't any easier if not harder than the distro they're based on and add extra bloat and bugginess on top. I installed Debian and went through a nice looking graphical menu and clicked buttons to install it

[kfzhu1229]

Sorry for necro-posting, I know you are busy taking care of grandkids and cashing in social security checks by now
Hopefully you still still see this

No amount of old $50 2000's laptops is enough. Even if you have 20 of them, they still cost less than a MacBook combined, and they are laptops, so they don't take up too much space
You can still get good use out of C2D's and late Pentium laptops with Linux. I find the T60 to be perfectly usable in the current year, even though mine only has 2 gigabytes of RAM. I use my computer to browse the web, watch YouTube, read stuff, and memorize things, so I don't particularly need a NASA workstation . Heck, even if you needed to do things such as compiling programs or gaming, mid 2000's ThinkPads with a high-end CPU and dGPU should be good.

My collection has changed a LOT since that time of posting, and so have my skills of working on these laptops vastly improved, and I work on things no one wants to do, such as hinge repairs and battery repairs/unlocks.
Now in that picture of the Core 2 duo laptops, basically every single one had been sold. The XPS M1330 had a northbridge failure and got thrown away, the poor T61 is now serving parts for another 14.1" widescreen T61 that's in much more pristine shape, and I have the Precision M4300, the Compaq 6910p and the Pavilion dv5000. Everything else were all sold. Point being that the Core 2 duo laptops were hitting the point of them depreciating fast so I sold all of them and buy in ones for much cheaper later
And now, I got a fleet of Acer beaters... Ironic I guess as someone who's so good at fixing this era of laptops and tinkering with them, that I end up getting enjoyment out of buying in a stash of Acers, fix up their hinges and strengthen their plastic chassis with my some dozen variety of adhesives and glues, use some and then resold them once I stop using them often. I guess my expertise have now far outgrown that there are just not enough things broken on a business class laptop for me to truly make use of my expertise
But I do still have a Compaq 8710w with me and now a ThinkPad X60 with me, the 8710w being picked up as unwanted trash from a forum member here after its mobo broke and the T9500 and 4GB RAM sticks ripped out by the owner, that I eventually finally found a parts machine to swap mobo with for the right price.