FALLING APART The house is shaking with loud bangs from, hopefully just the carport, roof. It was like this all night, with strong winds, which at least made me get up early and have a little time to type this before starting work. I just saved my car from a bit of the rusted-out guttering that had fallen away from the carport and was flapping about - I've been thinking about fixing that lately while dealing with reconfiguring one of the downpipes so it doesn't keep getting blocked, but it's still not a high enough priority. From a distance it looks like the little old greenhouse that I wanted to turn into a darkroom by replacing its blown-out wall panels is now in the process of falling down, so I guess I've been too slow on that one as well. Ho hum. Last night I started rethinking Thinkpads. Not abandoning them, but well just all the newer ones. The R60 that I was going to upgrade to but hadn't actually switched over to using regularly yet, died. For no apparant reason, it had been sitting in its laptop bag for up to a month doing nothing, then it started just sitting at a black screen with the power light on (and drives powered up). The first couple of times I was able to get it to boot after a couple more power cycles, after which it worked (and shut-down then immediately powered up again) completely fine. But now it's given up entirely and just sits there black - it doesn't even spit out a beep code if you pull all the RAM out, which suggests something serious. Anyway, I pulled everything out, including one of the two RAM sticks (and alternated the active one/slot), nothing makes any difference. Without HDD, CD-drive, battery, BIOS battery (which I'd already renewed), or WiFi card, it still acts the same (also no output to an external monitor). Last night I tried swapping the CPU with the only seemingly compatible one I had in the newer section of my CPU collection (which is mostly full of 486s with bent or broken pins that I got from the estate of my step-father's relative). As another Intel Core 2 Duo (T6570) with a faster FSB frequency spec., it seemed on paper it should work, but with that inserted the laptop doesn't even stay on, it just flickers with life then turns off completely. So I'm guessing that either means the CPU is a dud, or more likely the laptop's chipset refuses to even try running it. Actually the way it died suggests to me more of a motherboard failure than the CPU anyway. I've been considering trying yet again to find a cheap old Thinkpad online to work as I wanted the R60 to - an x86_64 machine with similar power to my Atomic Pi "internet client" that I can use when away from home (booting off the internet client's micro SD card), as well as something with a bit more grunt for KiCad and 3D modelling programs than the 1GHz PIII in my current 20 year old Thinkpad. But in the roughly three years that I've been slowly moving towards this upgrade, this is the second Thinkpad that I've bought and had the motherboard die. Granted that's a small sample size, and I've been buying them as "untested/for parts", but still they were running and my current Thinkpad has survived regular transcoding work converting videos to play with my old TV media player system for years. The T61 died after a few days substituting for my internet client - just sitting at idle most of the time, and turned off at night. Now the R60 dies after sitting in a bag, and just as I'd worked through all the little Linux driver niggles and got everything set up "just so" with my first Devuan install. At the end of the day there are a number of things I don't like about these newer Lenovo models anyway, even if the list is shorter than with the current stuff they slap a Thinkpad badge on. Even little things like adding a windows key to the keyboard (which itself isn't quite as nice to type on, though still better than most), as well as the exposed flex-PCB cable running to the screen and different internal construction. So I've decided to give up. I'll keep using my old Thinkpad, for which I have spares for most parts (except, well, the motherboard), and when it does die then I've got other old 32bit Thinkpads with similar specs. I can stick with the old 3D modelling and circuit design software that I currently run on it. For when I'm away from home I can use a Toshiba Satellite Pro L300, which I have left over from the batch of laptops that I sold on Ebay early this year because it wasn't worth enough to bother with. It has a similar specs to the R60 and should work as my internet client substitute (which is all that I've been using the R60 for over the last few months anyway). There are many design aspects that I don't like compared to the Thinkpads, but I don't really do much computing away from home anyway so it doesn't really matter that much. I also have two batteries for it, which seem to work. Though in Linux, the Xorg graphics driver won't load and the WiFi isn't detected, so it's back to square one with all that... On the other hand this morning I did think that the T7500 CPU in the T61 might be worth trying in the R60, as I'm pretty sure it was still working when it died (was running with I/O errors until rebooted). So looks like I'll be pulling them apart one last time after all. It probably won't work, but I do hate to admit defeat, and enthropy seems to be laughing at me pretty loudly at the moment. - The Free Thinker.