eBay purchases have changed a lot. Back in the day eBay (to me at least) was very much about individuals selling their odds and sods, alla a digital car boot sale.

I’ve been using a mixture of Chromebooks and a Windows desktop pretty much exclusively for the last 5 years for my personal computing. Since the start of the 2020 extra home time a few projects have come up that were well suited to Linux and that was my direction of travel. I’m not new to Linux having used it for a number of years prior, specifically Ubuntu and then later Centos so I was pretty sure of what I was getting into. I have an older Thinkpad x201 that I use as my garage/workshop machine when a project calls for it. Before making any purchases I tried things out on this machine and I liked what I saw.

I’d seen a couple of Youtube videos (damn you Youtube) on the logic of buying older hardware, from compatibility to value for money and it made sense to me. I like working from Laptops and so a new (old) machine was at the top of the list. I wanted something with hardware that was almost certainly going to work without issue with Linux. After some research and from my experiments with the older laptop, Lenovo Thinkpads topped the list, so 13 or so years since my last purchase from eBay I decided to take a risk and buy from there again.

My first choice was the Thinkpad X1 Carbon. I found a pretty good deal, Gen 3 spec with an Intel Core i5, 8GB RAM £350 delivered but I was too slow to make the decision, someone beat me to it. That feeling of missing out :-( Then eBay suggested the Thinkpad x260 as an alternative and I was hooked.

What drew me towards the model I went for was the 16GB RAM already installed. The x260 has a single RAM slot so having the max RAM installed already would save me an upgrade. The final spec then was Intel Core i5-6300U at 2.4Ghz with 16GB RAM and 256GB SSD. The only noted issue was some white spots on the screen only visible on a bright white background. A risk but worth it. It arrived promptly, as described and I was and am a happy buyer.

One thing I hate are loud fans on a laptop (or desktop for that matter) and especially those that are on all the time or pulsing every few seconds. I was glad to find that the x260 fans rarely fire up and when they do they are tolerable and on for no more than a minute.

I got Ubuntu Mate running without issue or having to tweak anything, another tick in the box. Battery life is OK, this is a five year old machine used in a corporate environment and therefore I wasn’t expecting miracles in this department but easily a good few hours of continual use. Interestingly the x260 has 2 batteries, an internal and a removal battery so that when the external is out of charge, the internal kicks in and saves you from those “quick, I need a power socket” moments. A future purchase may be a replacement for the external battery but for now it’s good enough for my needs and as described by the seller.

But, you know, once you start… Youtube (again!) led me towards Lenovo’s tiny PC range and specifically the Lenovo Thinkcentre M93p. My projects would need some dedicated hardware right? I decided on 2 x Lenovo M93 Tiny PC each with an Intel Core i5-4670T processor and 8GB RAM. One had a spinning disk at 320GB, the other a 128GB SSD. One would be my development server and the other a desktop machine. These machines are real space savers but are very functional. 2 additional purchases made, 2 machines delivered exactly as described, 1 very happy purchaser.

So there we have it, my old but new to me technology refresh. What am I doing with all this stuff you might ask? Well that’s for another time.