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Showerthought: My old ThinkPad from 2015 still beats my 2023 laptop at daily tasks
I dug out my old ThinkPad T450 last weekend to see if it could still turn on. It did, and I ended up using it for three days straight. The thing is heavy and the screen is dim, but it never stuttered once with 20 tabs open and a Zoom call running. My 2023 laptop with a shiny i7 froze twice during the same test. I learned that battery life and raw speed numbers don't mean much if the machine can't handle real multitasking. Has anyone else found an older laptop that just works better than their new one?
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taylorm891d ago
That ThinkPad from 2015 has WAY better build quality than anything made today. I've fixed so many newer laptops where the hinges snap after a year or the keyboard stops working. The T450 was built when Lenovo actually cared about durability, not just making things thin and light. You probably noticed how the old one gets warm but never throttles, while the new one has to run fans at full blast just to not melt. If you swap in an SSD (if it doesn't already have one) and max out the RAM to 16 or 20GB, that machine will run circles around most modern laptops for another five years. Just don't expect it to game or render video, but for web work and office stuff it's basically bulletproof.
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ruby2901d agoMost Upvoted
Right?? And the thing nobody talks about is how the heat from these newer laptops actually kills the battery faster because they're always running hot. My old T450 still holds a 4 hour charge somehow while my friend's 3 year old XPS barely lasts an hour now. I think the cooling is way overtuned on new models like the fans are fighting a losing battle against the chip design... Once you put a Linux distro on that 2015 machine too it'll feel snappier than 90% of what's on store shelves right now. Just gotta keep the dust out of the vents every few months, that's the whole secret.
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