Geek.

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that I had discovered Free Geek Chicago, an organization devoted to recycling older computers, saving consumers money, and saving the planet by breathing life into computers that would normally find itself in a landfill. One of the laptops I purchased is a Lenovo ThinkPad T410. It’s a respectable age. The keyboard is a little worn looking but otherwise the laptop is in beautiful shape and has been working well. I am currently running MX Linux on this computer, and I’m using it to type this blog entry.

The hard drive is a decent 256 GB, which is fine for my needs. However, it was an older spinning hard drive. Having used Apple products for the past several years, I had forgotten how easy it can be to update components in your favorite laptop; this generation of ThinkPad makes the task very easy. I have a 2014 Mac Mini on my shelf that can’t be upgraded at all, and to me that’s rather wasteful.

Our local Micro Center had a sale on SSD (solid state) hard drives, and I picked one up today for $35 plus tax. Within 10 minutes of arrive home, I had swapped out the hard drive and was restoring everything to where I had the laptop before I decided to make the change.

The new hard drive has really kicked the performance of this older computer up quite a few notches. This ThinkPad T410 is now flying along like it’s less than a year old, even though it’s probably closer to seven or eight years old.

While Apple does great things for consumers, and I believe they are trying to do great things for the planet, the idea of having to buy a new computer every X number of years or upgrading your phone every year to the latest and greatest gadget is not fitting in with my recent line of thinking.

I’m feeling like I can embrace this nifty little ThinkPad for the next couple of years. I feel like I’m making a contribution to keeping a perfect computer out of a landfill.

Small steps.