One of the downsides of breaking out an old laptop to test something that involves a bunch of file I/O, is watching the battery life deplete. To be fair, my old X61T was old when I bought it. That it’s still got about 44% of its original battery capacity left is kind of impressive, and it’s enough for it’s purposes.
One of the upsides of modern software is the oh crap your battery is at 2% warning 😆. This is a great contrast to my very first laptop, where there was a certain tendency as it aged for the power connector to get loose enough to stop charging, and the key way you could tell was the BIOS changing the screen brightness…or the screen suddenly going blank.
The part that I find kind of sad, is given the popularity of ThinkPads I could probably dig up an aftermarket replacement battery for this old machine, but Hill was mostly an experiment that didn’t work out due to hardware issues. On the flip side, somewhere between updated Alpine Linux and replacing my wireless network, the Lenovo PCI-E ID locked BIOS and its P.O.S. Intel card no longer seems to experience routine firmware crashes and connectivity problems. Which has made it rather handy for those times where a spare Linux computer to one side is useful. I think my fiddling with vintage Macs has also in a round about way, provided the hardware that I would need to flash hacked BIOS for removing the hardware check and bumping up the SATA link speed.
But let’s not go booting into DOS while we’re at it 😛