Cheap computers

I like cheap computers. Like, I derive pleasure from cheap computers. Something in my brain gets excited about technology you can do so much with being so.. cheap. I even once tried to start a cheap computer club on the Onio.Cafe. In an ideal world, we'd suck as much utility out of each device before throwing it away as eWaste as possible. Cheap computing could really count as its own hobby, at least in my book. Growing up in the 90s and 2000s, there was no such thing, as far as I can remember, as an affordable computer that could do common computer tasks reasonably fast. Now there are so many options for sub-$100, that it can be kind of a fun game to see the best you can get for $100.

For example, I recently saw a Late-2013 15" i7 MacBook Pro with 16gb of ram for around $80 shipped on eBay in working condition... that's incredible! I only know that because my main laptop is the 8gb version of same model and even today my Macbook Pro is still kicking it, able to edit photos on Lightroom and Photoshop and watch YouTube videos. Some of you may not be Mac fans, and reasonably so (let's go right to repair!) but those Macbooks, at least the early 10s, were in some ways built very well!

Today's look isn't at an Apple, however, but at another brand of laptop with a similarly devout following. I spotted a marketplace listing for 3 Thinkpads going for $40, located about 20 minutes away. Having always had a curiosity and a desire to try a ThinkPad (I had a difficult time choosing between a ThinkPad W540 and that late-13 MacBook Pro when going to college), not knowing anything about which models I was picking up or the extent of their condition, I decided to try my luck. I figured I could always flip these if necessary. What I got was an X220, X201, and x120e.

The first thing I did was turn on each computer to see if they would boot to BIOS. None of them had an HDD installed, which is fairly common with used computers. All three booted, and I could see that the X220 and X201 both had 4gb of ram installed, and the x120e came with 2gb. Checking online quickly, I learned that the X220 could be upgraded to 16gb max, while the X201 and X120E could handle up to 8gb of memory. The X220 had the lowest tier i5 option processor option, an i5-2410M. According to benchmarks, this processor was only a 3% performance improvement over the i5-560M that arrived in the older X201. Still, it's the fastest of the bunch, the one in the best condition, and the one with the max RAM capacity, so it's the one I'm deciding to keep. I had an extra SSD in my main PC that I stored games on, games I don't need to play, so I wiped that drive, stuck it in the X220, plugged in a USB drive with Linux Mint on it, and went to work. Installation went well, and I played around, opened several tabs and a couple programs, with no struggle at all. This low tiered X220 still had some life left in it.

I did some research and I learned that the X220 was well known for its modability, repairability, and of course its 7 row keyboard. There are numerous mods for this old 12.5" huggable laptop. You can swap out the charging port for a USB-C typing charging port. There's the cool LibreBoot BIOS firmware upgrade. You can very easily swap out the keyboard, and there are Japanese format keyboards available out there that could look really cool. You can swap out the ugly TN screen panel for a full HD IPS panel. You can upgrade the wireless, you can connect the fingerprint reader's USB ribbon to connect to other USB devices, you can repurpose the bluetooth slot into a hidden internal USB port, you can upgrade the speakers and the battery, you can even add USB 3.0 ports or heck take the entire motherboard+CPU unit out of an X230 and stick it inside the X220 body.

Of course, all these mods would probably push this beyond $250, and that's not a cheap laptop. That's also not a "good" laptop for the price. Heck, the $80 late 2013 16gb Macbook Pro retina will still likely blow this thing out of the water in terms of performance and its monitor, and at $250 you're approaching used 2020 M1 MacBook Air territory, which blows both options and many more out of the water. Why pay so much for such inferior specs? Well, this isn't about performance. This is about a particular aesthetic, a particular experience, and making your electronic device truly your own. Sure this laptop was built a work tool 14 years ago and now it's long in the tooth, but today it's a toy for nerds like me who admire its quirkiness, longevity, portability, hackability, and durability. If it scratches, well, it's plastic, and this thing is made up of so many plastic pieces, many of which can be 3d printed if necessary. If you spill water on the keyboard, the water goes thru the keyboard into a tray and out special holes in the bottom of the laptop. There's no backlit keyboard, but there IS a ThinkLight, a tiny flashlight above the screen that shines down on your keyboard and anything else you put in front of it. This thing has CHARACTER! It's just such a fun little device. Now am I going to spend $250 upgrading my X220? No, no I'm not. But I am going to upgrade it, the extent of which will depend on my budget.

Ah, yes, did I tell you have I have budget in mind for this? Having decided to keep the X220, my goal here is to get a nice little laptop for $0. So far I've spent.. $40 on the laptops, est. $5 on gas, about $12 on cleaning supplies (magic erasers and isopropyl alcohol). Those last two were to clean residue off of the X201 and to clean up the surface of the X220. So now I'm down -$57. I want my computer to come in at $0. Thankfully I had a spare SSD, so no money spent on that, but at the very least I'm going to buy 16gb of RAM to max this device out, and that will cost about $14, bring me down to -$71. I have a lot of balancing to do get my free computer.

This is where the other two laptops come in, which unfortunately aren't in such great condition.

Let's begin with the X120E. I did manage to boot to Linux, which is a good sign, though it might need a new coin battery, as it wouldn't boot to the OS at first because the time and date wasn't set. I'm curious if that coin battery is depleted, if it is, I suspect I'd run into this issue every time and have to set the time and date in the BIOS every time I wanted to use it. However, I haven't tried booting it again to see if that error returned after unplugging it, mostly because I discovered that the right column of keys, including the arrow keys, the enter and shift key, the backspace key, none of them work. It needs a keyboard replacement. Unfortunately, being the least powerful laptop of the bunch, with the lesser popular chiclet style keyboard, I don't think I can fetch much money for this in good condition, which is a shame given how clean and odorless it is (that last part is important.) The keyboard being broken isn't a huge deal, but the keyboard replacement costs $16, and I see these running for about $40-$50 on ebay with free shipping. I might listing this in its current condition and hope to get a $20 profit from it. That could chisel us down to -$51, still a long way to go.

Thankfully the X201 is still a much more desireable machine, its body used for a popular mod. I see these listed regularly for $100 on eBay. Unfortunately, my copy of the X201 has lot of issues, including a crack near the cooling fan, multiple scuffs on the lid, a short but thick scratch on the screen, the keyboard needs to be replaced (the caps lock key is missing and the '6' keycap is falling off,) the ThinkLight isn't turning on, creaks when closing, a missing cover for the HDD drive (I ordered replacement from AliExpress for like $3, bringing us back down to -$54) and the top of the laptop was covered in sticker residue (though I managed to do a decent job of cleaning that residue off using isopropyl.) Most annoying of all, it smells like a small petting zoo. Like it smells like animals and hay. Every time I turn the laptop on, it pushes out hot air that smells like I just walked into a barnyard.

On the plus side, aside from the scuff, my X201 has a pretty decent screen, it's RUNNING well enough, I can pull the 4 gb ram from the X220 when I get the 16gb in and put that into the X201, it has a charger and a battery with 83% capacity, and it's the popular 7 row classic keyboard style. I think I might be able to get lucky and sell this for $54 + shipping online, maybe, and that will balance my budget to $0.

Anyway, that's the plan. More pictures later.

Oh, and I still have to tell you guys about the $40 27" 2009 iMac which I also got this month, but I'll add that later.

-Onio