Favorite computer?

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

What’s the favorite computer you’ve used, (past, current, wished for)?

I always like my newest computer because it runs faster, has the current features, etc. but the old IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad series of laptops were among my favorites – the T40 and T60 series especially, also the X series – the X201 is a solid system.

I used to like the Dell D600 series in their day too!

You?

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Brian Masinick

[Member olsztyn]

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Brian Masinick wrote:

but the old IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad series of laptops were among my favorites – the T40 and T60 series especially, also the X series – the X201 is a solid system.

Lenovo/IBM laptops are the ones I like the most. Those ‘older’ ones in particular. Over time I bought on eBay and I am using:
– Two Thinkpads T520 full HD IPS – i7
– Three Thinkpads T410 1440×900 14inch screen – i5
– Thinkpad X220 – i7
– Three X61 – Core2Duo.
Particularly what I like in ‘older’ Thinkpads is that many parts are easily replaceable, battery is removable, keyboards are probably the best. I have spare keyboards and multiple batteries for each model…
I do not need/want newest laptops. Not much is replaceable in them. Battery is often built-in, so spare battery is not an option. If battery goes bad (they are the most vulnerable parts) then it is usually not easy to replace, etc…

• This reply was modified 10 months, 2 weeks ago by olsztyn.

Live antiX Boot Options (Previously posted by Xecure):
https://antixlinuxfan.miraheze.org/wiki/Table_of_antiX_Boot_Parameters

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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As far as replacement parts I can do that for desktop systems.

I did replace the HDD with a SSD for my Dell Inspiron 5558 laptop but in general my hand/eye coordination is not good so the more space I have the better; replacing hardware parts does have a similar satisfaction to learning and mastering software.

How about other people. What are your favorite systems, especially the older ones?

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Brian Masinick

[Forum Admin anticapitalista]

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Another Thinkpad fan here.

My favourite (mostly used) is L412 i5 8GB RAM lenovo thinkpad (2013) with old style keyboard.

Philosophers have interpreted the world in many ways; the point is to change it.

antiX with runit - leaner and meaner.

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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Cool; Thinkpad laptops are hard to beat!

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Brian Masinick

[Member punranger]

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This may be somewhat controversial, but my favorite computer of all time is my Macbook Air from 2015, which is what I’m using most of the time when I’m sitting in my armchair. I just bought a replacement battery. Some time in the near future I expect the SSD to break down, and as luck has it, you can replace it yourself, which I will. The machine runs Catalina quite comfortably, but I’m guessing that this will be the last version of Mac OS that is supported. I never had a single equipment malfunction in 7 years. I think I had to boot into recovery mode once or twice in all that time. Do I like everything that Apple does? No. This will probably be the last Apple device I ever buy. But this machine has saved my life so many times. Once Apple stops supporting the OS, I am going to install antiX on it, and hopefully extend its life for many many more years, until the components start falling apart.

And, by the way, I do run antiX on it as well! antiX 21 in Virtual Machine works like a charm on this box.

antiX linux: The best way to revive an old computer - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCTaUAP6sSg

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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punranger wrote:

This may be somewhat controversial, but my favorite computer of all time is my Macbook Air from 2015, which is what I’m using most of the time when I’m sitting in my armchair. I just bought a replacement battery. Some time in the near future I expect the SSD to break down, and as luck has it, you can replace it yourself, which I will. The machine runs Catalina quite comfortably, but I’m guessing that this will be the last version of Mac OS that is supported. I never had a single equipment malfunction in 7 years. I think I had to boot into recovery mode once or twice in all that time. Do I like everything that Apple does? No. This will probably be the last Apple device I ever buy. But this machine has saved my life so many times. Once Apple stops supporting the OS, I am going to install antiX on it, and hopefully extend its life for many many more years, until the components start falling apart.

And, by the way, I do run antiX on it as well! antiX 21 in Virtual Machine works like a charm on this box.

I’m not threatened or bothered by differences in the least; if I were, that would be hypocritical of me, since I constantly urge everyone to be open to diverse opinions and diverse use of free and proprietary hardware and software.

Thanks for sharing; I hope to hear from others who are not afraid to share their own flavors of diversity in hardware and software.

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Brian Masinick

[Member calciumsodium]

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I have many favorites. I mostly have computers that were mostly discarded, thrown out, or unwanted. I try to salvage and fix them up. Each of them have their own unique stories.

One of my favorites’ has this story:

There was an old computer tower that collected dust in one of the rooms in my parents’ house. I would visit them during the Christmas holidays, and I would stay in that room that had that computer. Years and years I would look at that computer just sitting there on the floor collecting dust. So one Christmas holiday, I asked my parents if I can have it and see if it works. The computer power supply works when I plug it in, but does not boot. When I opened it up, there was no ram installed. This motherboard has a much older ram setup. Also, the hard drive was busted. There was no keyboard with it. This motherboard required that much older keyboard that looked like a PS-2 type, but bigger socket. A PS/2 keyboard would not fit. So I had to find that keyboard that would fit. So I searched for parts that would fit. I found 4 ram chips that would fit into that motherboard. These ram chips looked like sticks instead of the modern day flat ram chips. The four chips totalled 16 Mb of ram. Then I found an old 500 Mb IDE hard drive that I connected to the computer. I installed DOS on that hard drive. I also found a keyboard that would fit into that computer. Finding that keyboard was actually the hardest part. The computer finally starts and boots up. The processor is 100 Mhz. I run dos programs on that computer. It stills runs and I use it periodically. It has a floppy drive. I run many programs from that floppy drive as well.

This was the first computer that I was able to fix up.

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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I’m back on my Dell Inspiron 5558 now. This was one of the first devices I owned with a backlit keyboard, so it started me into wanting that on my “newer” hardware.
This is now in my somewhat dated collection, though the “newest” of my older systems. My Micron 100 Mhz desktop was the first computer I bought for home and personal use. Prior to that I did occasionally bring systems home but they were owned by the companies for which I worked.

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Brian Masinick

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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By the way, I started using Linux regularly on that Micron 100 Mhz computer and that was my primary motivation for purchasing it. Slackware was my first distribution.
A few years later I got a Toshiba laptop. I put Caldera openLinux eDesktop 2.4 on that one.

After that I got a Compaq 5000 series desktop and a Dell Dimension 4100; the Dell served me well and I opened it up several times; replaced the fan/power supply, added a second disk, changed network cards, did more with hardware modification on the Dimension than any other hardware I owned.

At my first tech support position I installed operating systems, updated memory and disk drives, and maintained updates; I did that because most of the tech support people did not “seem” very sharp to me, so I wanted to experience, first hand, their responsibilities; it is a time consuming job, but I was correct that only a few people were REALLY good at it. That experience did lead to more appreciation of the complete hardware and software lifecycle and also fueled my interest in owning my own systems. I went into full time testing when I moved to contract employment.

Now happily retired, I’m definitely a “historian”; many of my historical interests are in the areas of hardware and software, so this discussion is interesting to me.

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Brian Masinick

[Member madibi]

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I feel connected to the Compaq brand: the first 386 marketed in Italy belonged to Compaq. May be in 1986. That year IBM was selling only 286. So I had one Compaq purchased from my office.

At the time, EDP managers believed in the fable that PCs should be measured in % compatibility with IBM products!!!

So for that reason IBM products no longer entered my office.

To my opinion for a long time Compaq was the absolute best DOS/Win pc. And that pc with 1Mram, usable only 640k, before extended-expanded memory, for a long time was in my office and then at home.

Now I don’t have a really favorite pc

m

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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Back in the early 1980s when I was still a young programmer I did not fully appreciate everything that IBM contributed to computing. For those of you who do not know, IBM, AT&T and Xerox used to be innovators, and since they were among the largest companies, with the largest research budgets, they produced a lot of great stuff.

Some of the disk technologies now in use were researched by IBM 30, 40, in some cases, nearly 50 years ago, though the oldest of these are nearly extinct at this point. Xerox, predominantly a photography and imaging company, still came up with the graphical display and graphical interfaces, but really didn’t know what to do with them, so they sold the rights; Apple was one who knew exactly what to do with them.

AT&T did a lot in telephony, they were certainly in the forefront of the research and development of wireless networks and their signaling technologies, but they also did operating system research and development; the UNIX work evolved from another project, a collaborative effort called MULTICS that was cooperatively designed and developed by companies that, to my knowledge, aren’t even in the computer operating system business. Of course UNIX still exists, but Linux, the small-scale personal project founded by Linus Torvalds, dominates the UNIX replacement OS stuff. BSD, a university UNIX rewrite, and Linux, are behind the Apple iOS (BSD) work and the Android work today; those efforts ARE NOT BSD or Linux, but Apple’s work DOES use a kernel modified from one of the BSD projects, and Android uses a Linux kernel.

Though the companies of the sixties, seventies, and eighties share but a sliver of the perceived market share for the products and services delivered today, it was their research, development, and even their “fumbles” that have led others to investigate other methods, improve on the technologies that were created, and spawn many new works.

I still say we’re on the cusp of significant changes, possibly a complete “rethink” of what and how an operating system is built and what kinds of inputs, outputs, and mechanisms it uses. Since much of the inputs and outputs work the same that they did when the original concepts were invented, though they have served us well, what if voice, eyes, and movement had a more direct impact on those inputs and outputs? What else might change? If those kinds of ideas aren’t being worked on, they should be! (I’m not the one to do it, but I can be one to express ideas, and who knows, possibly stimulate thought, effort, research, design, development, and future implementation – I can at least DREAM, can’t I?)

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Brian Masinick

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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I hope the younger community within us are able to actually contribute to, witness, and enjoy the fruits of the next generation of innovations; they are bound to come, and when they do, they may usher in an entire generation of possibilities, ethical, legal, and moral matters to think about and overcome once again, so to the thinkers and innovators to come, do your thinking, and all that comes from it, with due diligence and care!

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Brian Masinick

[Forum Admin rokytnji]

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I really like my Dell XT2 Touchscreen laptop with included wacom pen in the laptop body.

Aint the latest and greatest < 2009 > but it is a tough netbook. antiX and Fluxbox MX linux like it.
https://www.ruggedpcreview.com/3_notebooks_dell_latitude_xt2.html

Sometimes I drive a crooked road to get my mind straight.
Not all who Wander are Lost.
I'm not outa place. I'm from outer space.

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[Forum Admin rokytnji]

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When it comes to desktop computers.

As soon as I memorize where to use the solder gun to jumper the bios plug socket.
I have a feeling Chromeboxes 3 series by samsung that are chromeos EOL and cheap are in my future.

Sometimes I drive a crooked road to get my mind straight.
Not all who Wander are Lost.
I'm not outa place. I'm from outer space.

Linux Registered User # 475019
How to Search for AntiX solutions to your problems

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