I picked up a Lenovo Thinkpad X131e for $30 this weekend, in mint condition. The keyboard and screen are immaculate.

It's a Chromebook, I wanted to have a spare for my daughter and have one to play with for a while. Unfortunately it's a bit older and EOL according to Google. It's stuck at Chrome 69.

I opened up the inside and it's got 2 memory sockets and a space for a 2.5" SATA drive. I tossed a 32GB SSD I bought as a test drive and Chrome sees it
as storage. Nice.

I've got a couple of options. I played with Crouton and got a recent version of XFCE running on it. CloudReady is a third-party ChromiumOS that supports this model. And, with some BIOS tweaking you can install bare-metal linux.

I migth stick with Crouton, and when my daughter's Chromebook finally dies, powerwash this one and give it to her.


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On 26 Apr 2021, poindexter FORTRAN said the following...

I picked up a Lenovo Thinkpad X131e for $30 this weekend, in mint condition. The keyboard and screen are immaculate.

~~

I opened up the inside and it's got 2 memory sockets and a space for a 2.5" SATA drive. I tossed a 32GB SSD I bought as a test drive and Chrome sees it as storage. Nice.

i have a similarly anemic ThinkPad X140e. i believe most of these types of machines were originally targeted to the education sector. mine will use 85-90% of the cpu just looking at the task manager :)

browsing and stuff is okay though. can't expect it to be fast, but if you throw the maximum ram in there (mine was 8gb). i've never had it freeze up / require me to kill processes. i wouldn't use it with 4gb though, at least on my setup with Win 10, because then you'll be swapping to the disk..

it does have hardware acceleration for video decoding though.. looks like yours probably does too. luckily - because i really don't think the cpu could do it.

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Re: New Toy
By: poindexter FORTRAN to All on Mon Apr 26 2021 06:52 am

I picked up a Lenovo Thinkpad X131e for $30 this weekend, in mint condition. The keyboard and screen are immaculate.

Nice find! I've won 2 netbooks on ebay for $25 and $30. If one is patient there are a lot laptops out there to be had. I remember when a laptop was so far out of reach at $2000. I could only afford building my own desktop. Using my kithen table as my work station. Tower under the table. Wires, modems, monitors. Now I can hold all of that in my hand. ;-)

... After two days in hospital, I took a turn for the nurse.

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Re: New Toy
By: HusTler to poindexter FORTRAN on Tue Apr 27 2021 08:13 am

Nice find! I've won 2 netbooks on ebay for $25 and $30. If one is patient there are a lot laptops out there to be had. I remember when a laptop was so far out of reach at $2000. I could only afford building my own desktop. Using my kithen table as my work station. Tower under the table. Wires, modems, monitors. Now I can hold all of that in my hand. ;-)

i remember when i wanted laptops and notebooks so bad and i couldnt afford them. now i have the money and i buy them but they sit around doing nothing.
i'd rather use my phone while sitting in the chair watching tv.
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Re: New Toy
By: MRO to HusTler on Tue Apr 27 2021 11:16 am

i remember when i wanted laptops and notebooks so bad and i couldnt afford them. now i have the money and i buy them but they sit around doing nothing.
i'd rather use my phone while sitting in the chair watching tv.

I understand that hard. Sometimes you want a full-on experience with your tech, and other times you just want digital white noise to recharge after a particularly taxing rabbit hole. Just make sure you put your phone in a Faraday cage when you're not using it on the go, otherwise you're just giving another way to track yourself.

This guy gives pretty steps on how to keep yourself secure on his site: digdeeper.neocities.org

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Re: New Toy
By: Tortillaretreat to MRO on Tue Apr 27 2021 06:34 pm

I understand that hard. Sometimes you want a full-on experience with your tech, and other times you just want digital white noise to recharge after a particularly taxing rabbit hole. Just make sure you put your phone in a Faraday cage when you're not using it on the go, otherwise you're just giving another way to track yourself.

This guy gives pretty steps on how to keep yourself secure on his site: digdeeper.neocities.org

i'd have to root my phone and i dont want to break any phone functionality.

i just want a phone that runs linux and can make calls. i wish we could have that.
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Re: New Toy
By: MRO to Tortillaretreat on Wed Apr 28 2021 12:05 am

i just want a phone that runs linux and can make calls. i wish we could have that.

Wait, why does it have to make calls?

:D

Have you played with Termux at all?

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Re: New Toy
By: Phigan to MRO on Wed Apr 28 2021 12:00 pm

Re: New Toy
By: MRO to Tortillaretreat on Wed Apr 28 2021 12:05 am

i just want a phone that runs linux and can make calls. i wish we could have that.

Wait, why does it have to make calls?

:D

because once a month i make 1 phone call or someone tries to call me and i dont pick up.

Have you played with Termux at all?

i probably messed with it before.
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fusion wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-

i have a similarly anemic ThinkPad X140e. i believe most of these types
of machines were originally targeted to the education sector. mine will use 85-90% of the cpu just looking at the task manager :)

It's definitely beefy, like it's been designed to be rugged. Nice keyboard
and trackpoint reminiscent of other Thinkpads.

As a Chromebook, it does just fine - I ran XFCE under crouton yesterday and
it seems to get out of its own way. It performs admirably, for the price.
:)


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