My faithful companion
This page is dedicated to my computational companion, xbook2, a 2011 Lenovo x220.
This machine was gifted to me by a friend back in 2016. They worked for a large company's IT department doing their 5 year hardware refresh on some laptops. They knew I was in the market for a replacement to my aging IBM x61 and asked if I wanted an x220. Of course I accepted. As of the time of this writing it's January 2020 and the x220, which I have affectionatly (ok, maybe more pragmatically) named xbook2, is still seeing regular use as my primary personal computer system. Over the last few years, as applications and web pages have become more bloated I've had to make some changes to the tools I use but by and large the system still performs exceptionally well. In the last four years the system has also been given a few upgrades. The first thing I did was purchase a replacement 9-cell battery for it. The one that came with the system was the smaller 6-cell unit and was very much past it's prime. At the same time I also swapped out the spinning hard disk for a 256GB solid state drive. In 2018 I “found” some sticks of RAM that would work with the system and double the memory capacity to 8GB. This is still very much how it lives today. The cost of solid state storage has fallen so dramatically over the last few years that I've begun to think about upgrading the drive again. 256GB is starting to feel a little bit cramped, having only about 20GB left on my home partition and less than 5GB left now on the root partition.