Retrocomputing
March 28, 2025
After I bought my new computer I started thinking about the Surface tablet I take with me when I travel. It's always been a bit of a pain to use with its flimsy cover/keyboard and a Bluetooth mouse that would need to be unpaired and repaired on a regular basis. And over the years it started bogging down, even compared my ancient PC.
So I bought a new (to me) laptop. It's a Dell Latitude E6430, from 2012 or 2013. It came with Win10, but I decided to heck with it and threw the same Linux on it as is on the new desktop machine. And... it's fine. Certainly not zippy, it's more than a decade old. But it doesn't show noticeable lag on anything, it wakes from sleep nice and fast, and its battery can hold a decent amount of charge. All for $110, which ain't too bad.
And then I caught a rare batch of motivation. Over the course of a few weeks I'd been taking the books I'd piled up around the edge of the bedroom while I renovate the back bedroom and put them in boxes, then moved the boxes into the basement. My bedroom is almost devoid of floor clutter now, there are only a few piles of non-book stuff that I found while I was clearing out and consolidating things.
One of the things I found was my old MP3 player, that I hadn't even thought about in probably 15 years. Its little 30 GB hard drive (yes, hard drive: this was when solid state was stupidly expensive, remember) still spins and it's honestly impressive that nothing had seized on it over time. It still takes power, so I could give it a listen to make sure it still works, but that old battery won't hold a charge at all. I'm sure you're as shocked as I am.
Aside from that its buttons are a little sticky, but the whole thing is generally serviceable and I decided I'd like to take it with me to listen to while I walk. The phone is no good for that since (a) no headphone jack and (b) I'd have to listen to Pokemon in addition to my music.
Turns out they still make the batteries it uses, and it's from the days when a battery swap was something you could do without tools. So a new battery is on route now; I should get it over the weekend. And then I can relive the heady days of... 2006.
