[PLUG] T60 upgrade at Clinic

[Keith Lofstrom]

At Linux Clinic on Sunday, we put together Larry's T60 thinkpad laptop
(from a $20 carcass at Green Century) and rebuilt some of my spare 
pile.  I finished upgrading them;  7 machines upgraded to the latest
BIOS, 3GB RAM, new 2GHz 64 bit T7200 processors, replacing some T2xxx
series 32 bit processors.  Those will be my lifetime spares, until
full-size screen laptops with trackpoints and shaped keys are for
sale again, or I get a graphics brain implant.

BTW, I purchased 8 processors on eBay for $8.59 each from
xhenxia-2011 in Hong Kong.  They are clean and seemingly brand
new, and all are working fine so far.

The processors came in little plastic clamshell containers with
AMD tags on them, and were wrapped with what looked like toilet
paper.  The "toilet paper" is actually slightly conductive (about
100 Giga-ohms/square ) so it is antistatic - perhaps it is a
brand of tissue that just happens to be good for antistatic wrap.

The T60s in use will get terabyte drives - I'm thinking of using
the new hybrids. a terabyte of rotating disk and 8 gigabytes of
SSD.  The laptops will run Scientific Linux 7, which promises
security updates until 2027.  With the spare fans, keyboards, and
screens, they should last a while, and I can worry about more 
important things than the hardware upgrade treadmill.

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com