I’m thinking of picking up a used ThinkPad on eBay for cheap to serve as my daily driver. I’ll likely run LMDE, and primarily use it for web browsing, office programs, coding, and FreeCAD. Any recommendations on which model would best hit the sweet spot of capability vs price?
Also I heard the thinkpad golden age was around pre-2005 when ibm was in charge.
You may get top-notch casing and chassis quality, but all the computing stuff would literally be two decades behind.
Yeah, I bought my first laptop, a Thinkpad T43, in 2005. It had something like 512MB-1GB of RAM, a Pentium M processor, and 156 GB of HDD (not SDD). Very good for the time, but there are Raspberry Pi’s with better specs these days.
The early Lenovo period W series were (imho) very good as well, still have my W500 series which is built like a tank. Survived years of college, years of lugging it around to customers and data centres and having somebody spill a full cup of coffee over it (yes, the drain holes do work!). It only required replacing of the monitor cable once, which was a pretty easy thing to do. Unfortunately the CCFL backlight has lost quite some luminance by now, but guess after 16 years that is to be expected. Can’t get myself to part from it though, so many memories attached to it.