I picked up a Core 2 Duo Toughbook for $40 US on eBay a month or so back. I had to spend another $9 to get an Intel WiFi card for it but it worked right out of the box. With an older processor and only 4gb of RAM it isn't a powerhouse dev machine, but for email, web, etc it works great. The wifi has good antennas and quite a nice range.
To me that is a great example of what is wonderful about OpenBSD. The community isn't afraid to get rid of or replace old code. That keeps the OS light and performant. Any other operating system I have experienced (windows, macOS, Solaris, OS/2, AmigaDOS, even Linux to a certain extent, etc.) gets slower with each subsequent release on older hardware. Not so with OpenBSD - in some cases it even gets faster. As a software developer for the last 30 years, I totally get the trap. You want to add your feature or fix your bug, and the complexity of the entire system surrounding youmakes you worry about your change being too intrusive and inadvertently breaking something else in the system. By being courageous and deleting stuff you know is a problem, sure you might have unintended side effects that you have to expend energy to fix, but you also fight against that complexity demon that makes you increasingly more nervous that you let inefficiencies develop and build over time. Thank you again to everyone who has contributed over the years for your hard work! We do genuinely appreciate it. On Sat, Nov 12, 2016 at 9:04 AM <[email protected]> wrote: > On Sat, 12 Nov 2016 07:25:11 -0600 > Chris Bennett <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > > I also notice that Thinkpads and Toughbooks seem to be the preferred > > choices for a cheaper laptop. I need a newer laptop too, so I will > > look into those on ebay. > > > > Thanks > > Chris Bennett > > > > Toughbooks, when new, are definitely not cheap. Even when second-hand, > they are probably a little more expensive than their Thinkpad > counterparts. OpenBSD has a habit of working very well on older > ThinkPads. > > Not that it's a bad thing though, you do get what you pay for. The > price difference is significant though, and boils down to the fact that > one brand is a solid, rugged machine built for field use, and how a > laptop should be anyway, and the other brand is a cheap Chinese > product, which relies upon shoddy and questionable quality control and > business practices. > > For a second-hand Toughbook to be very cheap, it is usually almost a > decade old. However, a new Toughbook CF-31 will work around 90% well > with OpenBSD, though I am not sure about the optional GPS or HSPA modem.
