I'll third the nigh-invulnerability of ThinkPads. My main personal machine is a T400 that's been through absolute hell, was used when I bought it, and in the past four years has needed only a harddrive (after the stock one succumbed to, ahem, an out-of-operating-spec instantaneous acceleration), a screen (after being crushed by the motorized seat of my BMW, and the casing itself survived unscathed), and a replacement trackpad assembly (because the mouse button that took the brunt of the crushing force in the screen incident eventually became unreliable after several months).
Also the keyboard is amazing and there's an actual third mouse button and it's easier to perform physical repairs on than most desktops. I will say though that I'm firmly in the camp that there's been a steady decline in build quality and keyboard feel over the years. I had a W520 an employer gave me for a while and it didn't seem discernably better than an average consumer laptop. -Leander On Wed, May 4, 2016 at 12:40 PM, Denis Heidtmann <[email protected]> wrote: > On Wed, May 4, 2016 at 5:53 AM, Rich Shepard <[email protected]> > wrote: > >> On Tue, 3 May 2016, Denis Heidtmann wrote: >> >> > Suggestions on an alternative laptop? Keys are the first requirement >> > (along with Linux, of course.) And that Dell mentioned here a while ago >> > with a non-replaceable battery seems to me to be a bit stupid. But >> maybe I >> > can be convinced otherwise with suitable arguments. >> >> Denis, >> ... >> Now, another suggestion for your consideration. A few years ago I bought >> my sister a Compaq Presario CQ62 laptop (15" screen, 64-bit AMD CPU, 2G >> RAM, >> etc.) She's no longer able to see well enough to use it and returned it to >> me since she's sold her house and moving to in independent living >> facility. >> It has a virus-infected win7 on it and is waiting for me to install >> Slackware-14.1 (or, I might just wait until 14.2 is out and install that). >> Since I don't need a third laptop sitting here I'd consider selling it. >> Might this meet your needs? It ain't the System76, but it's in good >> condition. >> >> Rich > > > Rich, > > Thanks for the offer, but I think I want something a little more modern. > On the 76 I got fond of the performance provided by the ssd. Snappy > response to launching applications is habit forming. I have a virtually > new 2.5" 128G SSD that my son gave me. It would be nice to put it into > service. > > -Denis > _______________________________________________ > PLUG mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
