Refurb Thinkpads, was Re: [ltp] Thinkpadd T430U

[Helen Borrie]

At 10:50 a.m. 19/03/2014, Jeffrey L. Taylor wrote:
>Quoting Helen Borrie <helebor@iinet.net.au>:
>> At 10:11 a.m. 18/03/2014, Steven J. Owens wrote:
>[snip]
>
>> Well, long story short, the T61 is so good that I gave the T60 to the
>> technophobe, set up the database server on the old T42 and set up the T61
>> for myself.  I love the T61 more, I confess, than the T60.  More real estate
>> on the screen, better video.  Missing from it, though, is any useful PCMCIA
>> ports (one is diverted as a Smartcard socket, the other as an SD card
>> reader).  From the stickies on it, this refurb appears to be one of a bunch
>> of custom builds the refurbisher bought from a local Telco.  It also has 3G
>> built in, which is of no interest to me.
>[snip]
>
>IIRC, the fluid bearings in the T42 hard drives expect to be powered up 48
>hours at the most.  They need some down time to reform properly.  You may wish
>to investigate this.  Laptops are expected to have a different usecase than
>servers.

I'm sure you're right about that, but I swapped out the original 40GB Fujitsu drives from the two T42's very early in their respective careers and replaced them with vanilla-flavour HItachis.  One of those boxes (the one now acting as battery charger for the T43) I bought as a "new" refurb from Lenovo Australia's eBay site circa 2006. It came with a 9-cell battery. Until 2010, it ran as my Intranet server and was never down.  It ran off battery for a few hours several times a year, thanks to the frequent power cuts from thunderstorms where I was living in Australia.  After 2010, it became the technophobe's daily bread for cricket, golf, news, email, Skype and Solitaire.  Just a big iPad, really.

The other one - formerly my late mother's Skype machine, now a database server - is running 24/7. I've moved the 9-cell battery onto it and I'm pulling the plug on it once a month to drain the battery. It survived two earthquakes in Christchurch in 2011 and 2012.  In the second earthquake it fell to the floor and stayed there when my mother was evacuated up to us in Auckland.  When I accompanied her back to her place eventually, her T42 was still up and running. 

The HDD on the T43 is the original 80GB with that loopy protection system (forget what it was called).  I had a vanilla Samsung in it for a while but got sick of the self-crippling feature that Lenovo built in to the T43 bios for HDDs that didn't have that protection system.  It's a database server, too, one that spends most of its time asleep.  The PCMCIA expresscard works fine on this box and it's good enough for my purposes to have /opt (where the dbms engine and the test db's are located) on an external SATA drive. 

I do hope there is NOT another Grinch lurking in these handy little boxes.  I'll be sure to report it if anything shows up.

Helen