The Thinkpad R60
----------------

I use an Thinkpad R60 since about 11 years ago as my daily
driver. Why? Because its - for me - the perfect laptop.
Yeah, i know that there are more modern systems out there
that would have a much better battery lifetime, are faster
and lighter (and as the systems guy / head of it for my
employer i tested quiet a few) but no laptop i tried so far
has achieved the level of thinkpaddieness my old R60 has.

I bought the R60 cheap at a time where i was unemployed and
- to put it mildly - dirt poor. My previous desktop system
  (a quiet powerful gaming rig) was fried by an overcurrent
due to lightning strike and this left me without a usable
computer. Which is bad if you are looking for work and need
to write applications and CVs.  

At that time it had an spinning 40 GB HDD, a cracked case, 
loose and wobbly display hinges, a battery life of about 15
minutes and an not very powerful Core Duo CPU. It was slow, 
looked like trash but it helped me getting back on track.

After landing a new job i started to fix the R60 and make it
a bit more usable. The first thing i did was to order a
new battery. Thankfully, the Thinkpad has an easy
changeable battery: Just turn it over, push the quick
release and put in the new battery (a feature that is
utterly missing on todays laptops). 

The next thing that i swapped out was the hard disk: At the
time i had landed a new job but my financial situation was
still very edgy, so i rummaged through local private ads
until i found a very cheap (about 10 Euros) 120 GB HDD. This
gave me a bit more "breathing room" and got me to a really
usable - albeit slow - system i could run OpenBSD on. This
was the setup i worked with for the next couple of years. At
some point i had again the financial means to easily replace
the system with something more up to date... but for what? I
could code on this system and do everything i needed it for. 

A couple of years later (at this time the Thinkpad had
already got an SSD and an major optical overhaul), on one
morning the display was broken. On one half it displayed
everything ok, on the other half it was more or less pixel
mush. Thankfully, even that was no problem. I bought an
replacement display of ebay for about 30 Euros (which came
from an better model and had a better resolution), spend a
few hours looking at a couple of repair videos on YouTube
and read a bit i could easily change the display. 

Now, a major problem was the Core Duo CPU (being 32 Bit), a
couple of months ago i looked into the matter if i could
future proof the R60 a bit more... and yes, no problem! I
found out that i could easily switch out the CPU for an Core
2 Duo, so i again looked into ebay and bought a brand new
(ok, NOS) CPU for about 10 Euros, spend an lazy afternoon
taking the R60 apart (and as i had it open already cleaning
it) and switched out the CPU. The Core 2 Duo may be still an
outdated design, but it was a major power boost and made
especially surfing the modern web (a thing i try to avoid
but is sometimes nescessary) much more palatable.

So... with the story of the Thinkpad written down, will i at
some time replace it? Yeah, very likely, but this is a day
in the far future and even then i will perhaps go for
something like the MNT Reform (in my mind a spiritual
successor of the Thinkpads of the olden days). But as i
said: Not now or in the foreseeable future