T400/C840
I recently went through the agony of deciding whether to replace my aged ThinkPad T400 with a new laptop or simply replace the worn keyboard with the erratic spacebare and pop in an SSD (even though it has only SATAII interface). I decided keeping the relatively nice keyboard (no chiclets), 1440x900 display, and more than sufficient performance for what I do these days (writing novels with LibreOffice Writer, not code these days though I've spent 50+ years doing the latter) for $150 in easily-done repairs/upgrades beat the crap out of spending $800+ for something that, although newer and having a FHD screen). The Core2 Duo P8600 is plenty fast enough, Linux Mint 18.2 gains performance over Win 7 on a second SSD in the Slim Bay, lets me play casual HOPA games on the Win7 disc, and works just great for the casual web browsing I do. 802n may not be the fastest WiFi around but since my broadband connection is much slower anyway, who cares how fast the last link in the network chain is? A 3rd-party battery gives me 6+hours of battery life too. So it's not fashionably slim and light, WGAF?
I also have an old Dell C840 with a P4M and a very fine 1600x1200 large screen. Yes, it's slow, but it runs Libre Office writer very smoothly (once loaded) and is limited as much by a broken memory slot that only lets me use 512MB as by its speed.
If I could have the C840's screen on my ThinkPad, I'd be in hog heaven.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
