Hi, For other reason I'm not comfortable pushing that way, capacitors can give up after quite long time thus I'd probably check for 3-6 years old.
Though I don't apply this to myself, I got a 20+ years Toshiba and very happy. Except the graphic card gave up so I it runs console, but I'm still happy with it for it woks well for purposes I need it. I found out OpenBSD is about the only universally running os, hardly found hw it could'nt support though as you mentionned peripherals could be missing. NB heat is aging faster, so consider underclocking, might not be popular but I usually do that for this purpose. Laptops can get quite warm. J.-François Le 16/06/2021 à 02:14, Thomas Vetere a écrit :
Hello everyone, I was looking to get a laptop to run OpenBSD. The one I am looking at in particular is the Thinkpad R51e (2005). I like this particular model because it does not come with any extra hardware that OpenBSD does not support in the first place (bluetooth, camera, etc.) My main concern is the longevity that this model would have going forward. I already have a '94 Thinkpad that cannot run the latest OpenBSD well because hardware support was gradually dropped during code cleanups, etc (i.e. newer versions of X11 removed support for my ancient graphics chip because it just wasn't worth the time to maintain the code). Does anyone know, given the age of that model, how many years I might get out of it with OpenBSD and its packaged software before hardware support starts to drop? What is a good rule of thumb for selecting a machine to run OpenBSD with respect to its age? Thank you for your help!