Is it worth maintaining a 7-year-old laptop?

Sounds like you're talking about either the original Acer Aspire netbook or its Packard Bell cousin (same internals, different plastics).
The original 2200mAh 3-cell batteries are cheap enough and there's plenty of larger ones too. 4400mAh, 8800mAh, even 14400mAh if you want.
I wouldn't put a 1TB HDD in it indeed. It gets pretty snappy with an SSD tho, can only recommend that mod. Sure, you're going to bottleneck the SSD in terms of transfer speed, but the response time is all that matters for this little thing.

no.

IBM T60 Yes.

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Lenovo S10-2 with the optional 6, count em 6 cell battery. I used to set this up and just watch a playlist of movies all day, then when I was done about 40% of the battery capacity would be left. Today its just a relic, not worth replacing the battery since it never moves and really its not worth doing much if anything with it than just a little light torrenting when I'm bothered to use it.

Its not worth putting much if any money into it, I did buy a mini PCIe to USB 2.0 adapter (part of mini PCIe spec a set of USB2 compatible pins), Porteus boots off that and its much more responsive than XP which boots from the 160gb drive but most of thats due to Porteus being really really optimized for PC's with limited resources. Anything more than what it already has is overkill, its not worth upgrading.

That's nice, I'd rather save up for something like that rather than have something for 2 years and then have it die.

OK, I get your point. Also, the quantum diamond PC is cool! Was it te PCWorld article? http://www.pcworld.com/article/3053886/diamonds-may-be-quantum-computings-new-best-friend.html

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Wow, nice setup!

I'm glad to see that old doesn't necessarily mean good (although I still have the feeling thinkpads are somehow better than the Acer and Apple stuff, dunno why, can anyone refute that? Maybe find a really shitty Thinkpad?)

@Klingon00

I'm looking into the hard drive cage in the DVD drive as well, it would be really nice to have more storage, however I think that a platter-based HDD would make my laptop more fragile (I can't say I handle my laptop in kid gloves, although I should, probably)

@NotNot

Keep me posted on the upgrade, I hope to hear about your new NAS soon! Don't disappoint me! :-D

@anon5205053

Don't bash my laptop!

Sure thing. I still use a thinkpad x220t and its great in terms of performance and practicality. however it is bulky and it gets hot. but its great keyboard and IPS display make up for that.

thinkpad

They sell replacement parts for that, don't they? That's my problem. eMachines don't sell jack s**t...

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Replacement parts is the main reason why buying business-grade laptops is a good idea.

I will never buy a consumer-grade laptop ever again.

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Much like Kemo, I also had a T400 (2009) that I had upgraded to the full 8GB, but a few months ago (after things such as the thermal paste, GPU and fan started to fail, probably because it had about 5 screws left, but don't worry about that) I gave up and got a T430 and transferred all the RAM over, along with the flash drive holder I 3D printed at school to fit in the DVD slot. The keyboard is different but is otherwise a complete improvement for me, and saved me a lot of time getting new screws, thermal paste, and getting the GPU to work properly again.

My suggestion is to (like others) get a business laptop; since they don't tend to change everything from one years' model to another, many of the parts can be transferred over, and in my case just a simple direct upgrade from USB 2 to 3 (and more ports) were a nice touch that was in part worth it to upgrade in of itself.