[faxmeyourcode]

I ran a T450s all through college. My late grandmother gifted me the money after high school graduation to buy my first laptop. I'd learned to code on the old gateway pentium 4 (Windows XP) machine with 512 MB of RAM from the factory. I'd resurrected it as a teenager and completely gutted it. I scoured the web endlessly looking for something that was _not_ touchscreen (hard to find at the time), linux-compatible, and rugged enough for the neglect of a college student's backpack.

It was a linux user's dream. I swapped out the spinny HDD with an SSD. It had hotswappable batteries, a spill resistant keyboard with a drain system, and I ran every linux distribution I could get my hands on, eventually settling on the xfce flavor of Ubuntu.

I still have that machine, and will keep it for my son when he's older. I plan to replace the battery and SSD with something more reliable. These days I use an m2 macbook air for portability... but that thinkpad is still something I will treasure for years.