Suggestions for how to use a T43

[Vistance]

Hello everyone, I recently bought a T420 to replace a not very portable gaming laptop with mediocre battery life and coincidentally I found a very cheap T43 at the same time. The amazing part, this T43 is basically perfect. No shiny keys, no scratches on the screen, very minor wear on the outside, has Windows XP Pro installed and fully up to date. The original 9-cell battery actually still holds a charge for about 2 hours +/- too (And the battery is from 2006). For whatever reason, I'm enamored with this laptop and I really like handling it. It has an 80 GB HDD, 1.5 GB of ram and a 1.86 GHz Pentium M processor on a 14" (I think?) 1024 x 768 screen.

The thing is, I don't have any real need for this laptop but I don't want to get rid of it. And I don't want to start a collection of old computers (yet...). I've tried it out and found it plays standard def YouTube videos fine, but doesn't like HD videos. It generally browses the web fine too (Chrome was too intensive for it, I found Firefox to be much more lax on the resources). Sadly it seems that the CPU gets pegged at 100% often. Anyway, my question is what exactly are some of you fine folks using your T4x laptops for? I'm contemplating it using it as a laptop I can just toss in my bag and carry wherever without fear of something happening to it like I would with the T420. This T43 feels like it's on the border of being "too old to do anything useful" and "just fast enough to do useful things" and any time I think it's disappointing it can't do one thing, I find I'm impressed with how well it can do other things.

On a sidenote, does anyone else here have this sort of affection for your older ThinkPads? I fear what will happen to me if I get a C2D FlexView ThinkPad, I'd probably use it more than my T420... I once bought a very cheap iBook G4 that was in mint condition and despite being a dedicated Windows guy I couldn't help but be impressed with the little thing and its glorious little 700 MHz PowerPC processor. That little iBook's battery was original and still held a 5 hour charge! Shame it was so slow it couldn't do any web browsing and lacked a wifi card, ah well it was still a neat little thing. I guess I'm just impressed to see yesteryear's tech still kicking and doing fine well past the point of obsolescence (But I'm also into vintage hifi, and I enjoy my classic game consoles, so there may be something to this - just because it's old doesn't mean it's not still awesome)

[fschwep]

Let's see, I'm reading your post on my primary machine which is a T42p with 2 GHz CPU, 2 GB RAM and a FireGL GPU with 128 MB videoRAM plus a 14-inch 1400x1050 screen. And it has a WD 250 GB harddrive. So you could say this is about as powerful as a T4x could get.
I'm presently running Google Chrome with five tabs open, a file manager, a PDF reader (Foxit), an image viewer (Faststone), an e-mail program (The Bat), WordPerfect X3 wordprocessing with 3 documents open in parallel, plus Scribus page layout software to produce a promotional flyer. I just finished running Google Webmaster Tools on my website and watching/listening to a YT video about SEO at the same time. The latter was a bit bumpy but that's because I live in a rural place with a modest ADSL speed. So what did you say your T43 couldn't do?

Sure it's not as fast as a T420 but as long as you stick to Win XP and applications from the same era as the machine you can do most tasks. My advice would be to search for applications that are not heavyweight MS Office or Adobe stuff.

These are relatively bomb-proof laptops, with spare parts readily available on the web. Properly configured you'll have a good take-away machine that's cheap and won't make you worry too much about damaging or losing it. They also have good connectivity with a lot of older stuff in addition to the standard USB: classic modem, PC-Card slot, parallel printer port (handy with legacy laserprinters). Wifi reception is usually pretty good, too.
One thing I feel is way better than on a T420: the keyboard. Those older TP keyboards are unbeatable.

Enjoy !

[Vistance]

Thanks for the reply, have to ask are you doing anything special hardware wise on your laptop to make it perform so? I notice web browsing can be strained at times due to the flash heavy load on websites. Chrome had trouble playing 480p videos smoothly, but Firefox did them with great ease (I do have a few extensions - AdBlock, Dictionary, Weather, Gmail, IE Tab, LastPass, and a Flash downloader - but by the virtue of Chrome, unless I don't log in it autoloads all these extensions). I also use Avast antivirus and Comodo firewall, both very trusted software which I use on all machines when I can. Would I be better served using a different firewall and antivirus? I notice my CPU hits 100% usage a lot, do you encounter that often as well and simply tolerate it or have you cut your processes back enough to be loads the laptop can handle expediently?

Oh, one other thought - it has a Radeon X300. Now generally I would imagine this to be better than the Intel GMA because I had GMA graphics that were newer and still had some pretty poor performance out of them, though still understandably light-duty (I recall the TOTL Radeon was the X800 series, though I rocked an old 6600 GT in the day in my desktop).