Lenovo ThinkPad T42

On my trusty T42 (bought ~10 years ago for about 30 euros) the GPU finally died last winter (heavy, unreadable screen flicker during every slightly more intensive task). It has an IPS panel which itself still seems to be in order, though. Luckily, I accidentally saw a similar one (no IPS, though) for 26 euros, so I'm rocking again. Those 4:3 screens and T4x series keyboards are really hard to let go, and if your activities allow for more text-oriented operating systems (I installed 9front on mine, but used to be a dedicated Tinycore Linux user, and the T42 is also nice with the various open source DOSes we have these days), they're still perfectly capable machines for 90% of relevant tasks. CF cards make very nice poor man's SSDs, so the machine is also very quiet with this setup, so far the fan rarely turns on. As for my previous T42, I think I really squeezed a lot out of it, including using it to produce (and, on a few occasions, record live) 1-hour radio shows for my country's public broadcasting (honored to contribute to a "landmark" series where high production quality is a must). It was always fun to think that here I am, working on a 30€ 15-year-old machine, whereas other guys are doing their exact same montages on 2000€ Macbooks -- and regarding the resulting production, the radio listener will notice no difference whatsoever. :) Obviously, though, this is a geek thing, those Macs probably do make a lot of sense for serious audio production. It's completely crazy, th…

I like using old hardware, and Tiny Core was my daily driver for 5+ years on a Thinkpad T42 (died recently) and Dell Mini 9 (still working). I tried other distros on those machines, but eventually always came back to TC. RAM-booting makes the system fast and quiet on that 15+ years old iron, and I loved how easy it was to hand-tailor the OS - e.g. the packages loaded during boot are simply listed in a single flat file (onboot.lst). I used both the FLTK desktop (including my all-time favorite web browser, Dillo, which was fine for most sites up to about 2018 or so) and the text-only mode. TC repos are not bad at all, but building your own TC/squashfs packages will probably become second nature over time. I can also confirm that a handful of lenghty, long-form radio programs (a somewhat "landmark" show) for my Tiny Country's public broadcasting are produced -- and, in some cases, even recorded -- on either a Dell Mini 9 or a Thinkpad T42 and Tiny Core Linux, using the (now obsolete?) Non DAW or Reaper via Wine. It was always fun to think about this: here I am, producing/recording audio for Public Broadcasting on a 13+ year old T42 or a 10 year old Dell Mini netbook bought for 20€ and 5€ (!) respectively, whereas other folks accomplish the exact same thing with a 2000€ MacBook Pro. It's a nice distro for weirdos and fringe "because I can" people, I guess. Well thought out. Not very far from "a Linux that fits inside a single person's head". Full respect to the devs for their q…

Another possibility is Slackware 15.0 which is the stable release that gets updates. Available in 32 and 64 bit, runs a 5.10 series kernel (same series as antiX 32bit uses). I have an install on an ancient Thinkpad T42 with 1Gb ram, a single centrino chipset CPU, 40Gb hard drive and radeon graphics. Chugs along nicely with Abiword, Gnumeric and Dillo. Firefox will load but is deeply unhappy. (I install everything except the KDE and XAP package sets, and then install selected packages from XAP as I need them e.g. GIMP, xpdf and so on) MX has more recent packages for some things though, Slackware 15 is getting mature .

Around 10 years ago, I picked up an old Thinkpad T42, put FreeBSD on it, and had an amazing experience. Actually used it as a daily driver for a while, which seems crazy in retrospect, but I enjoy trying to work within that kind of constraint sometimes. I miss it! This post rekindles the flame...

Yeah, it has got me "in the zone" for writing many times. On a side note, I also like the "click" when I close the lid on my T42. Mentally balancing for sure :). I bought a used P50 for our son, and while it's allright (even the keyboard -- although it doesn't give that particular feel of the T4x era keyboards), it lacks both of those extra-relevant features. No click on closing, and a mere backlit keyboard. But, that's life!

You hit on why I got my first used ThinkPad many years ago (a T42): it was so cheap as to be disposable. I was going on a trip that promised to be somewhat...ah...rough on my kit, and I picked up the T42 for dirt so I didn't take my new, very expensive laptop only to have it trashed (I don't remember what it was now...probably some Dell). The Dell(?) is loooong gone. The T42 made it through the trip fine, and over many years has gotten an SSD, a memory upgrade and a new screen (old one worked fine; wanted the pretty SXGA screen) and because it has a real, honest to gawd parallel port, it's still serving duty today controlling some stuff in my lab (PROM programmer, some finicky windows software, etc). It might not be a daily driver, but it gets fired up most every week to do real work.

I've used Thinkpads consistently for 25-30 years, and still do. I can't really draw a line between "before" and "after" but if I take a long enough period I can definitely see differences in the experience getting watered down or generally worse, from less flexibility to lower reliability. I still have and regularly use a fully functional X200, somewhere in the box I have a fully functional T42 and an R31 whose only defect is a small screen blemish caused by me closing the lid with something on the keyboard. But my multiple X1 Gen1 and Gen2 all have various failures (screen, battery, webcam, or keyboard), my T450 has big battery issues, my T470s have screen/GPU and battery issues. T490 is fine for now, X1 Gen11 has crappy battery and is overheating from the get go. These are different generations, different lots and still affected by the same constant issues.

T42, T60, T62, T420, T520 (multiples of some around the house) here, ending at the point they changed the keyboard. All running linux, the T420 and T520 (with SSD's) are fine with modern browsers while the older ones can be slow on bloated sites. I imagine the RAM might be an issue with multiple electron apps though. Only real maintenance is to use quality battery replacements (T420 lasts particularly well on batteries).

A T42 with slackware and notion wm was my daily driver until around 2015, never really felt a need to get something newer and only did because I wanted something smaller/lighter for portability so I get a cheap $250 11e Thinkpad. Used the T42 regularly until it finally died in 2021 or 22. Miss the 4:3 screen and tiny trackpad. In just shy of 20 years the only issues I had with the T42 was a dead fan. Now I have an X13, 16 cores and NVMe still running slackware and notion, it flies. That $250 11e is still going strong, has survived 3 bike crashes and it shows.

I used a IPS-screened Thinkpad T42 (1.5 GB RAM, compact flash card in place of HDD) + RAM-booted Tiny Core Linux + Non DAW for producing radio shows for my country's public broadcasting. The T42's sound card didn't work, so a Zoom H1 recorder was used daily as an audio interface. I even used that machine to record something important outdoors with an Avid Mbox 2, but I remember feeling really uneasy as to how well this would work out. I liked the T42 a lot (I still have it). All in all, I guess it is time for HN to re-discuss Joey Hess' minimal setup: https://usesthis.com/interviews/joey.hess/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4721645 https://joeyh.name/blog/entry/xmonad_layouts_for_netbooks/ Or Jason Rohrer: https://usesthis.com/interviews/jason.rohrer/ http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/jason-rohrer/simpleLife.ht...

Prior to Apple hardware, I loved my T42... definitely a strong machine on a great platform. Maybe it is just small sample size, but my mil purchased an HP consumer laptop for ~$600 when I purchased my first MBP in 2010. Hers barely lasted 3 years for hardware and software reasons. My chugged on for 6 years. While the cost per year was similar... the utility was not. I hope it is better, but during the 1990-2010 period when I ran Windows based systems they inevitably would come to a crawl after a year of use. I would have to completely rebuild them, reinstall the OS and all programs from scratch to return them to utility. I honestly don't think I have ever done this with an Apple product.

> As it stands, there are almost no laptops out there that are suitable for development. Back in The Day, I got 80 columns and 25 rows on the VT100 terminal, and had no problems programming. Loved it, in fact. (Although anything less than 9600 baud was kind of painful) While I definitely agree about the 300 pixels at the bottom, and I miss my ThinkPad T42 even compared to my 17" MacBook Pro, life as a developer is great! Emacs still works, I can read documentation AND code AND the documentation is all prettified HTML with links you can click on. OpenGL hardware acceleration makes stuff so much easier now than what I had 10 years ago. On the Windows side, Intellisense is getting pretty good, as is Eclipse/NetBeans if you use Java. And while the widescreen misses some pixels, for UI work, it's almost like having two monitors, if you keep your code to about 80 characters and your app small. Plus, you can watch widescreen movies if you get tired of coding :)