The 2 most recent phones I've bought were usb-c. My Lenovo Crimebook is also. I haven't had a problem yet. People are stupid and probably abuse such ports.

My Lenovo lt was slow when it camenout 5 or so years ago. It's well made though and as close to the traditional tp look and feel as you'll get, that is apart from buying a modern tp. Can't speak to that though, they're pricey. And gorgeous and tantalyzing. I'm contempating parting out my current Lenovo and buying something way faster, for not a whole lot more money. I may windnup regretting the decision. Newer consumer level Lenovos are much crappier.

I have a rather high opinion of HP business desktops. Never knew of their business line of lts. The thought still gives me the willies. Maybe they're goodnthough. Don't know. Their consumer level crap is exactly that. Since before 2000 somewhat.

Used to have a bunch of vintage ThinkPads, but I sold 'em along with all the parts, guts, whatnots. I had:
- 2x 755CX, both dead to some extent
- 2x 760EL TFT
- 760EL DSTN (never again)
- 380ED with combo CD/FDD and Chinese keyboard (allegedly rare, got a good price for it)
- 560
- 560E
- 2x 560X
- 2x 600E
- 600X
It was fun stacking them all and making a metre-long tower of power in the storage 😁

Thermalwrong wrote on 2022-02-14, 10:27:

I wonder if that's why I'm so fond of the Thinkpad 240 series? They were really manufactured by Acer and don't have the rubberised coating ...

My favorite model to use on a "daily" basis and not to power on once a month, gaze at and shove it back into storage were the 560 series. Swift, portable, the batteries weren't dead, played a lot of games on them too depite the LCD not being able to scale pixels properly. On the other hand they wouldn't accept an IDE-SD adapter nor did I have that proprietary external floppy, so the one in the worst shape was my go-to retro machine for about 2 years... without screws for easy access to hard drive 😁
The 380ED was like a bigger 560 and not as comfortable to use due to it being bulky, the 755CX always booted up with a random problem, and the 760s - while arguably the cooles of the bunch, with a separate status LCD, flip-up keyboard, modular expansion system, but the keyboard itself was so awful it turned me off. The 600s were solid, though the rubber coating was not pleasant, and they all had to have their hard drive connectors fixed due to a "Fabrikfehler", so to speak.

I ultimately just kind of lost the bug for them? The more I used them the more of their drawbacks I noticed (limiting hardware, poor LCD scaling, comfort issues, various bugs and issues such as your screen suddenly becoming garbled and having to work on them for the next few days), and since I wanted to primarily play games and enjoy what hardware I've been missing on, I started getting into the standalone PC platform. Using my friend's Pentium machine with a Voodoo 1 and a soundcard with an AdMOS wavetable daughterboard was pretty eye-opening and a final nail in the coffin. I put all my laptops on auction sites shortly after.

That being said, my workbench machine is a docked X220 with Ubuntu, I used to use a T450s for about a year, and had both the X270 and the P53 for a few days. And I sure would like another ThinkPad in the future, even if it's one of those new ones that all the diehard fans rant about... They're still good, durable, longlasting laptops.

I'd like to get another 600, or an XP-era ThinkPad to incorporate into my retro PC network at some point in the future, albeit after IBM switched from the numerical to the new naming scheme I can't distinguish between all the models. I've heard the T43 and R51 are good all-rounders.

dr_st wrote on 2022-02-14, 21:38:

Bondi wrote on 2022-02-14, 06:44:

A21p - Flexview (1600x1200)+ DOS sound support. And overengineered beast.

I don't think an A21p screen is Flexview (IPS), unless it was upgraded. According to the Tawbook, the A30p had the earliest IPS screens among Thinkpads.

But I've had an A21m and was quite fond of it, until it suffered the common Blink-of-Death of that generation (due to faulty ADP3421 chips, IIRC).

Right, my bad. UXGA does not automatically mean Flexview. Nevertheless A21p has a very nice screen. But built-in speakers quality is much worse compared to A31p.
My A21p also suffers from BoD unfortunately. There are periods that it doesn't turn on at all. Sometimes after several months it works again. Currently I'm in a "good" period, it's been turning on once a day for already a couple of weeks 😀

Got a couple, X20 and T41. The X20 is really showing its age and needs a new HDD and the RTC battery is flat, but it still runs despite the odd CLANK (or is it CLUNK?) from the slowly dying HDD.

The T41 on the other hand is still going strong apart from the main battery which has succumbed to age and only holds about 5 minutes charge these days. It could do with a memory upgrade as well (still stock 768MB) but I can live with what it has for now.

I have a few of them, theyre all good machines, but none of them are the ultimate retro laptop. None of them can compare to my two toshiba 2805-S402 and s603. However their build quality are by far way better.

Toshiba quality went way down unfortunately by 2009.

My old Sony pcg-grx560 seemed pretty elite when I paid 2300$ for it. Not so much when it died 1.5 years later.