I've never modded a laptop before...

[robkelk]

... but I have modded towers, and I do have a T61 gathering dust. So when I spotted this article, I was interested.

But should I?

Does anybody know anything about the group that does these mods, Xy Tech (xyte.ch)? They're asking for payment up front.  Are the specs worth the price they're asking? Will that tech run the OS I have on my T61 (Win7), or will I need to upgrade that, too?

[Dartz]

That wouldn't be far off what I paid for my current laptop - with twice the core count and a dedicated GPU.

I know there's a cost associated with small-scale manufacturing, but it's still fairly pricey. One would have to consider if the other features in the Thinkpad's chassis would be worth it. But more than that, it would need to be asked if the battery, power supply, or other components that wouldn't be swapped would be up to the task.

That said, I'm all for reviving old things and keeping them running as long as possible, and Tiger Lake is still current - it's less than a year old


(I have an old Thinkpad X20, with the original DVD drive and floppy-dock assembly with dedicated serial and parallel ports. It still ran as late as 2014/215, on a 600Mhz Pentium III and 192Mb of RAM. It ran Xubuntu Linux, could do most things and made an excellent typing laptop. It finally let the smoke out when I tried to power it on for shits and giggles a couple of years ago. When that thing was new, Limp Bizkit was rolling and the World Trade Centre came as a pair)

[Star Ranger4]

Okay. Glad to hear your at least considering 'professionals' to do it. I've worked the hardware side of the equation for many years, and I still don't mess with Laptop innards.

As to the rest... Well, I dunno. Seems a bit pricy, but it looks like it also includes the R&D amortization up front as well.

Hmmm.... *reaches for the delete key*

[robkelk]

Yeah, "a bit pricey" is one of the reasons to not do it. (That, and the fact that the T61 still works, it's just slow.)

[Labster]

If you like the idea of modding your own laptop, can I humbly suggest the Framework Laptop?  Cory Doctorow approves.  Every part is built to be replaceable.

[Black Aeronaut]

Until Framework rolls out options for Ryzen CPUs, I ain't touching them. You can't possibly bill your product the way they do with a straight face if you're only exclusively offering Intel's CPUs - even if that means that a certain technology or instruction set you like isn't compatible. A lot of us are willing to do without in exchange for the performance edge AMD has over Intel at this time.