I use an Thinkpad R60 since about 11 years ago as my daily driver. Why? Because its - for me - the perfect laptop. Yeah, i know that there are more modern systems out there that would have a much better battery lifetime, are faster and lighter (and as the systems guy / head of it for my employer i tested quiet a few) but no laptop i tried so far has achieved the level of "thinkpaddieness" my old R60 has.

I bought the R60 cheap at a time where i was unemployed and - to put it mildly - dirt poor. My previous desktop system (a quiet powerful gaming rig) was fried by an overcurrent due to lightning strike and this left me without a usable
computer. Which is bad if you are looking for work and need to write applications and CVs.

At that time it had an spinning 40 GB HDD, a cracked case, loose and wobbly display hinges, a battery life of about 15 minutes and an not very powerful Core Duo CPU. It was slow, looked like trash but it helped me getting back on track.

After landing a new job i started to fix the R60 and make it a bit more usable. The first thing i did was to order a new battery. Thankfully, the Thinkpad has an easy changeable battery: Just turn it over, push the quick release and put in the new battery (a feature that is utterly missing on todays laptops).

The next thing that i swapped out was the hard disk: At the time i had landed a new job but my financial situation was still very edgy, so i rummaged through local private ads until i found a very cheap (about 10 Euros) 120 GB HDD. This gave me a bit more "breathing room" and got me to a really usable - albeit slow - system i could run OpenBSD on. This was the setup i worked with for the next couple of years. At some point i had again the financial means to easily replace the system with something more up to date... but for what? I could code on this system and do everything i needed it for.

A couple of years later (at this time the Thinkpad had already got an SSD and an major optical overhaul), on one morning the display was broken. On one half it displayed everything ok, on the other half it was more or less pixel mush.

Thankfully, even that was no problem. I bought an replacement display of ebay for about 30 Euros (which came from an better model and had a better resolution), spend a few hours looking at a couple of repair videos on YouTube
and read a bit i could easily change the display.

Now, a major problem was the Core Duo CPU (being 32 Bit), a couple of months ago i looked into the matter if i could future proof the R60 a bit more... and yes, no problem! I found out that i could easily switch out the CPU for an Core
2 Duo, so i again looked into ebay and bought a brand new (ok, NOS) CPU for about 10 Euros, spend an lazy afternoon taking the R60 apart (and as i had it open already cleaningit) and switched out the CPU. The Core 2 Duo may be still an outdated design, but it was a major power boost and made especially surfing the modern web (a thing i try to avoid but is sometimes nescessary) much more palatable.

So... with the story of the Thinkpad written down, will i at some time replace it? Yeah, very likely, but this is a day in the far future and even then i will perhaps go for something like the MNT Reform (in my mind a spiritual successor of the Thinkpads of the olden days). But as i said: Not now or in the foreseeable future