yeah, I wanted a board from a busted laptop and then transplant it along with the battery - plenty room inside.

then, all you’d need is a display controller that attaches to the motherboard’s HDMI and drives the display, those are like $20 on aliexpress. everything else is USB and can easily be soldered to USB connectors; the later unibodies would be way more difficult in that regard.

all there’s left is to incorporate some USB hub inside and that’s it.

there were some restomods, like the X62.

I wanted to do something similar with a 2007 17" macbook pro. they have LOTS of space inside and the keyboard, touchpad, camera, etc are all USB, so reusing them would be easy.

any mods around? what’s this bullshit have to do with programming?

it’s a fun hobby; I got rid of my T420s a couple months back. yeah, the keyboard is otherworldly, compared with what’s standard these days. and the expandability and serviceability (you can fit FOUR drives inside) - insane! there are custom BIOS available for them, enabling you to whitelist unsupported PCI cards, overclocking, 1866 DDR3, etc. cross-model compatibility is exceptional - I replaced my defunct soaked keyboard with one from a X220!

but then the novelty wears off and you can see them for what they are - really old tech.

like, the screens are dogshit, even if you get the “premium” 1600x900 ones. even with heavy tweaking you’re still in double-digits W/hr territory and you’re depending on shitty aftermarket batteries. the phenomenal keyboard isn’t backlit and is accompanied by a tiny (and shitty) touchpad. the device is thick and bulky and its power brick is that - a brick (at least on my i7 + Nvidia model).

by the time you upgrade everything (1080p IPS screen + adapter, 16 GB DDR3, fast SATA SSD, high-quality battery - none of those come cheap) you’ve already surpassed the price of a T480/490 that runs circles around it.

so, if you stumble upon one for free (or close to it), it’s a fun project, but absolutely not a wise purchase, especially not if you’re tight on funds.

not really, T490 are basically the same hardware with a modest CPU refresh, otherwise almost everything is interchangeable (also with earlier T470 models). similar with T14 Gen1.

what’s troublesome are the S-suffix models and the Carbons and similar, they are slimmer and have one or both memory banks soldered and are single battery models. you can stll swap SSD, batteries, etc. and the serviceability is somewhat OK (way better than the mentioned e-waste but worse than non-S models).

sure, take it slow. they’re only gonna get cheaper and if you’re not compiling/building large code bases daily, they’re still gonna be viable a year or two from now; same way you can today use something like a T420 without too much trouble (obv don’t buy something like that, but if you stumble upon one for free, have at it).

do not compare thinkpads to ideapads (or thinkbooks or thinkpad V-series). the former are heavy-duty devices that cost thousands of $ new (and you can feel that the moment you grab one). they’re built for road warriors and are meant to be used and abused for years. everything is so much better, from the build quality, easy repair and upgradeability (several generations share the same chassis, so replacing keyboards, screens, hinges, plastic covers, etc. is trivial and easily sourced) to way better keyboards, hinges, screens, etc.

the latter are cheap, drastic-plastic, deal-of-the-week future e-waste compatible only with themselves, maybe, with way worse build quality and very limited serviceability and cross-generational part compatibility.

same goes for hp elitebook vs probook, dell latitude vs vostro, and so on; there’s a huge difference between enterprise-class devices vs consumer-grade.

as to CPU performance, you’ll have to be the judge of what’s most important to you.

you should aim at $200 max, that’s way too expensive for 8th gen tech. ram and storage aren’t important as those can be upgraded stupid cheap; it’s not a bad idea to buy the laptop without those,

what’s infinitely more important are good batteries, you didn’t mention what condition the ones you get are in. if you need to replace those, good batteries aren’t cheap.

I have acknowledged that they’re that, but that’s not what OP asked for - they asked for a cheap setup (which the minis ain’t) and they intend to run a servarr instance, which implies large storage and those are both difficult and not cheap to cram into said minis.

I don’t understand the fascination of other commenters with mini-PCs, as the mini-ness was mentioned nowhere in the OP.

any used and decomissioned old office PC, any i5/i7 is way more powerful than you’ll need for that setup. you get everything you need right in the box and you can cram it full with cheap RAM and hard disks. you get to repurpose something that’s useless as a desktop workstation and not buy more future e-waste.

yes, the mini-PCs and the Rpis are more power efficient, but the operating costs of a $30-50 PC don’t come close to the price of buying one of these mini-things, not to mention - figuring out how to run large hard disks with it.

found a pretty reliable way to make it perform shitty - alt-tab out of the game, do something memory-hoggy, like firefox with plenty of tabs and alt-tab back. it’s often (but not always) super shitty then.

I’m on F40 Plasma, didn’t have that degradation on F39 Gnome when alt-tabbing; but then I had Gnome session crashes frequently, which never happen with Plasma 6.

it’s completely random and incongruent with anything that is or isn’t happening. same game (Starcraft 2 and Far Cry 5 are currently in rotation) runs fine and then it just doesn’t. yesterday launched SC2, played it for a while, everything is butter smooth. left it open to go make dinner. started a new game after like 15 mins - choppy, drops to 15 fps, horrible. played a couple rounds this morning - everything back to normal. and so on.

no huge temp spikes, no huge CPU loads, nothing I can pin down as correlated. both games are well within the capabilities of both CPU and GPU. I have C-states and Cool & Quiet disabled, so it’s nothing power-throttling related.

I don’t like rebooting, got way too much stuff open all the time, I do that maybe once a month; the rest is just suspend in the evening and wake in the morning.

no experience with this game but performance drops happen frequently and randomly for me, Fedora, Lutris, AMD GPU. like, I play a game that I have 100+ hours played on the same hardware and software and everything is dandy - 60 FPS, butter smooth mouse and game play. next day, same game, same settings, no updates in the meantime, absolutely nothing changed - 25 FPS, mouse stutters, horror. next day everything is fine, and so on.

I’m really sorry for reiterating this, but what you wrote also implies that movies that weren’t on any list will also be deleted (don’t want that), along with the movies that were on a list and now aren’t (do want that). do you have first-hand experience with this?

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QOwnNotes (had to look up the exact name as it’s the stupidest app name ever). but compared to joplin it’s lighter, faster, simpler (no database but individual .md files and folders) and works well enough with syncthing.

right, forgot about deduping, that is a huge factor!

sshfs and mount the remote fs locally. then you can use any editor/IDE you like.

thanks, holds well, no problems using it daily.

apart from the RAM and SSD ($50) just the screen ($50), so $160 all in. could’ve lived with just 8 GB and a smaller drive, but with these prices - why bother?

enpass for password vault, it has integrated nextcloud sync. for me, adding another selfhosted app wasn’t worth it.