I decided to upgrade to a newer Thinkpad laptop. Luckily, my old machine had still retained most of its value – I sold it yesterday morning for about what I had purchased it for a year and a half ago, thanks to Craigslist. Unfortunately, I haven’t yet ordered the replacement, waiting for a good sale might take a while, and I have to have something to use in my programming / project management job.
So I find myself typing on an old Thinkpad T23, a seriously amazing computer if we were still living in 2002, that I pulled out of a trashcan a while back. Seriously. It is like a wake up call. First of all, I can’t believe it actually works with the latest version of Ubuntu. It is slow, and I have to watch what I do since it only has 512MB of RAM, but it is surprisingly usable.
In fact, it is like a breath of fresh air in some ways. When I’m running my programming environment, I can’t really have my email program or a web browser running at the same time. So I have to focus on one thing at a time, and it really improved my concentration today since I hop around much less, and stay on track rather than continuously checking email and websites.
Although it is tempting to try and live with this machine long-term, I know that isn’t practical, as it does have some severe limitations that are going to cost me time and energy. But I’m actually looking forward to what I’m viewing as an experiment in tech minimalism for the next few weeks.
I’m looking forward to reading the rest of your posts!
I now always work with email, IM, web (wherever possible) software off. We are not evolved to do 10 things badly at any given moment, we are evolved to do one thing well and with full concentration.
Agree totally re old computers – I was still designing web sites on a 300mb thinkpad when the rest of the world had progressed to around 1.5 gh processor speed. I only stopped using it when the screen gave up the ghost.
Left by Stevwe on September 29th, 2010