Tachanka

In 2015 I spent €120 on a laptop with the physical properties of a battering ram. Tachanka has served me for 10 glorious years, and he has finally been allowed to rest after much faithful service.

Tachanka the Thinkpad T410 has no outrageous tech specs to speak of. i5-520M, 2GB RAM, 250GB HDD, TFT LCD screen. Where he becomes outstanding is the way it's all put together. Everything is socketed, not soldered, into place. Virtually every component is hot-swappable, and a surprising proportion of them can be done while the machine is still running. A full magnesium shell shrouds the heart, still indestructible despite my best efforts.

Almost everything got upgraded, bar the CPU. Several years and some lost screws later, Tachanka was rocking 8GB RAM, 1TB of SSD storage, doubled battery capacity, and a lightweight Linux distro that gave zero fucks about raw processing power.

His drawback - massive weight - was also his party piece, as you could drop him on a table with zero disregard for the subsequent earthquake. Glass tables were for weaklings anyway.

The foolish masses never understood. Tachanka was the equivalent of a Mercedes Grosser, delightfully overengineered. Unfortunately my D&D group did not appreciate my ability to reload the spare SATA slot like an AK-47:

I used him as a daily driver far beyond his usual shelf life, having been manufactured in 2010 and running happily until 2023. However the troubles eventually began to pile up.

The keyboard had to be removed every time you needed to access the front of the motherboard, and the clips had loosened and weakened the corners. The screen's ability to rotate 180 degrees had worn out the hinges. The ability to charge him became inconsistent, and it dropped power on rare occasions.

The charging issue became so troublesome, I had to perform a few operations. The first, a full disassembly, attempted to find any loose wires or other easy fixes. No such luck of course. The second operation was an attempt to replace some core cables, strip the machine to its bare insides (hot), and try jump-starting it under various conditions.

When it became clear that no accessory was causing problems, I resorted to changing the charging port and some electrical sections. No luck. Either I'd missed something, or the issue was on a main board that was discontinued over a decade ago.

With Tachanka already in a million pieces, I made the brave decision to keep the core components and scrap the rest. No modern machine uses a magnesium shell anyways.

I have no idea what to do with a BGA1288-socketed CPU. But if I thought of something cool, it might keep Tachanka still kicking in a sense. I have a drawer full of CPUs, maybe some weird art piece could work.