[GTALUG] Ontario Bill 72: "Right to Repair"

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: James Knott via talk <talk at gtalug.org>

| My notebook is a Lenovo ThinkPad E520, which I bought 7.5 years ago. 
| It's still going strong, though I put in a larger hard drive.  I've had
| a thing for ThinkPads ever since I worked at IBM in the late 90s and
| most of my work was on them.

I like ThinkPads.  But the E520 is heavy and burns a lot of power.

My (adult) kids have T520s.  But both kids rarely use them
because ultrabooks are so much more portable.

| I bought my desktop computer about 13 years ago, but have upgraded the
| mom board a couple of times and also disk drives.

That's a long time.

If you replaced the motherboard, I would guess you replaced the
processor and RAM at the same time.

What's left?

- the case (worth ~$50)

- perhaps the power supply (but then you won't be able to support
  modern video cards)

- video card (if any): current CPU's built-in GPUs would probably beat
  it.

- the floppy disk (I don't remember the last time I used one).
  I have an external drive if I need to use a floppy.

- the CD or DVD writer.  I don't use them that often.  I used one last
  month to create a bootable Fedora live install DVD because of a
  firmware limitation with a netbook.  Booting the netbook required an
  external DVD reader.

I'd just get a new box and leave the old one functioning as long as I
had a use and space.  (Is it any wonder that I need KVMs?)