The ThinkPad T400, which I call superslab, has been, beyond a shadow of a doubt, my favorite computer ever. I bought it on the cusp of a few big changes in my life. I had just been diagnosed with myasthenia gravis, and needed a smaller and lighter computer than the ThinkPad R61i I had been carrying, even the difference was only slight.
After a conference call with it, I set my headset (which has a long USB cord) down and then I turned around and started to walk away from the table. The system and the drink I'd had followed, much to my dismay.
I bought it in very early 2009 after selling both the aforementioned R61i and an iMac I'd gotten. I had become disillusioned with Mac OS X at the time, because my slower-and-junkier R61i had been consistently outperforming the iMac at literally everything I did at the time, even though the iMac had a faster disk, a discrete GPU, and a faster CPU.
The T400 was configured the way it was because I simply couldn't get the money to get a much lighter laptop and an appropriately powerful desktop. At the same time that late 2008 was a turning point for my health, 2009 was a turning point for my academic career. I had been doing photography up to that point, which had very heavy computational demands. Both out of interest, and related to my desire to look at computer information systems as a field of study, I'd been working with virtual machines on a regular basis.
Perhaps somewhat ironically, once I finished up with photography and made the switch to computer information systems, my actual need for computing horsepower plummeted. The university did a very good job of providing anything needed for my classes both through extended availability of computer labs, and through remote access. If it had existed at the time, the Surface RT would have been an ideal system at the time. I had enough access to remote systems, it might have been suitable as an only computer. Something I could have used to check email, consume media, and use Office.
The whole thing is difficult, because I like the T400 a lot. It was, hands down, my favorite computer, ever. It got me through a few different pivots in my life, and the serviceability of it meant that it lasted a lot longer than what another computer might have, here in the southwest where thermal interface material dries out and becomes ineffective, been done years ago.
For the time being, I'm accelerating my plans to review what I do with finnmark and knarvik. I've already set up the retail version of Windows 10 and Office 2016 on finnmark, and I will back up my data and get knarvik thusly licensed as well. I think I may end up using Windows 8.1U1 and a bunch of my software form superslab on knarvik. I suspect if I do this, it will get more use as I will have more trust in the software stack, which is perhaps ironically the main thing that kept me using the T400 to begin with.
Having a stable desktop platform, in combination with having reinstalled Windows 10 on the Surface 3, should reduce the need to use the T400. If I need something that's a "laptop" (or something that benefits from things like multiple USB ports, a full sized SD reader, and so on) then I can use one of a half dozen other machines, but in so many ways, none of them will ever be superslab, the T400.
The T400's age means I had already been considering whether or not to retire it anyway. It was not exactly "falling apart" but it was certainly showing its age after so many rebuilds. In addition, there's the pure fact that it's using laptop technology from eight years ago. There were CPU and RAM upgrades available, but there's not a whole lot more performance to be squeezed out of Penryn, as a platform. I would definitely have needed to start looking at changing its role anyway, and this just forces my hand on that.