Reuserism: My "new" Thinkpad 600E and my 2009 experiment

About two months ago the hard-drive in my Powerbook finally died, after 3+ years of my constant abuse. It was a trooper. The post-recall battery has been dead for at least a year, so the hard-drive was the final straw.

I haven't gotten a replacement hard-drive for it yet because I managed to near-flawlessly re-create my environment using Time Machine. Restoring to an Intel based iMac.

So just in case you're wondering, you can take a Time Machine snapshot from a PowerPC Mac, and Time Machine will re-create it on an Intel Mac without much drama. The problems I did have were very trivial (some screen-savers didn't work anymore... but, er... now they do, somehow. Without any intervention from myself. MatrixGL for example). That's a major architecture jump, so I'm happy it went well and was really easy; +1 for Apple.

This still left me without a portable computer. Rather than go the easy route and get a new hard-drive for my Powerbook, I decided to refurbish an IBM Thinkpad 600E I had sitting in the junk pile. It needed a battery, a charger, a hard-drive and some sort of networking device.

This move was more about getting a portable that I didn't have to worry about as much, rather than trying to save money on refurbishing the Powerbook back to tip-top shape (which would cost about $200 or so). I was eyeballing a Netbook, but they are too small for me and they're still more than I wanted to spend for a laptop that I was going to bike around with on my back.

I picked up a power cord off of eBay for $5, and a Netgear 802.11N card for $20. I was already in possession of a 30GB laptop drive that I had pulled out of my Clamshell iBook. The most expensive part was the battery, which was $50 from a local reseller.

Once we were up and running, I installed Ubuntu 8.04 with encryption, and it works great.

So my portable is $75, with a pretty smooth encrypted operating system; not bad. I can ride around the city with that and not worry that if I take a tumble I'm out $2500. And I can take it to the Reference Library or a coffee shop without sweating that it'll take a walk on me. Actually in that scenario I'd be more upset about losing my bag.

The 2009 Experiment: Reuserism

Inspired by how well this refurbishing went, I am going to try and not buy anything new in 2009. I won't create more waste. I'll save some money. I'll add some additional value to an item that's already made and is most likely perfectly usable. Reuserism rather than consumerism. So as an avid Reuser, I will keep the Re-user economy alive and kicking during this carefully crafted "economic downturn".

Points of Interest

I used these instructions to disassemble my Powerbook. There are actually slight differences in my Powerbook compared to Stefan Horn's, seemingly. He posted this article in 2003, and my Powerbook was circa 2005, one of the last PowerPC books. Mostly screw placement. But it's about 80% accurate between the two models.

The Abide Sticker came from lebowskifest.com.. so that's one new thing. But it's not 2009 yet ;)

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