Depreciation on my glorified telephone (AKA Thinkpad X61)

So I treated myself to a Lenovo Thinkpad a few months ago, as a reward for some really hard work I’d done. It’s a great machine; more powerful than my desktop but almost as light and small as an Eee PC. And it has a TrackPoint and a sensible display so I can get real stuff done on it without needing a separate mouse or monitor. Well, I could do, but in fact I hardly ever use it. I only use it for two things:
[ul][li]Skype (sound keeps dropping out on my desktop no matter what I tweak)[/li]
[li]Checking stuff on the Internet quickly when I can’t be bothered to start up the desktop (which won’t hibernate or stand by)[/li][/ul]

That’s a waste, really. A waste of money and a waste of a good computer. But I’m not sure whether to sell it and take a hit now (paid 38, won’t get anything like that if I sell it), or hang on to it and maybe sell it later. Still, it’s not an antique and while Thinkpads do tend to hold their value better than other notebooks, there’ll undoubtedly be some depreciation.

Thoughts?

[quote=“joesax”]

Thoughts?[/quote]

You won’t have a telephone if you sell it?

[quote=“Buttercup”][quote=“joesax”]

Thoughts?[/quote]

You won’t have a telephone if you sell it?[/quote]
Yes, true. Though if I sold it I could use some of the money for a phonecard or something.

I’ll give you 5K for it.

Maybe–if you can wait five years. I’ll probably be using it as an alarm clock by then, though. My current alarm clock is my old Treo PDA phone. It never leaves my bedside. I should start a mutual support group for people who use powerful technology for pitiful purposes.

Like posting on flob?

Seriously, I’d hang onto it. Maybe you just need to think about ways to utilise it. It sounds like a nice machine and it’d be a shame, unless you are trying to raise funds for something else.

[quote=“Buttercup”]Like posting on flob?

Seriously, I’d hang onto it. Maybe you just need to think about ways to utilise it. It sounds like a nice machine and it’d be a shame, unless you are trying to raise funds for something else.[/quote]
Yeah, thanks, you’re probably right. I’m not saving up for anything in particular at the moment. I do want to build up the kind of reserve I had a couple of years ago, but it’s going to take more than the price of a second-hand notebook to do that.

I remembered: I do also read e-books in bed on it! For anyone who ever wondered why you’d want to rotate the page view in Adobe Reader, well, now you know.

Perhaps I shouldn’t read tech blogs so much. It gives me the feeling that any new electronic thing is obsolete within three minutes of release. But really, stuff stays useable for quite a while. The reason I got an X61 is because I borrowed an old X40 for a couple of days and loved it. And my brother’s in IT support and his main computer at home is about four years old. (His other computer, an ancient Compaq brick, provides music for the living room.)

Hey i got the 10inch Eee PC pretty cool pretty cool. What kinda screen, specs u got? U wanna trade?

Mines the EeePc 1000hd with 1giga ram, 10.2 inch screen, 120giga hdd, only 2 weeks old. Great machine. Keyboard is 95pct of full size tho. win xp home. celeron

Joe,

Interesting problem. The only thing is: if you’re selling it for $, you’d be better to sell it NOW. Time is your enemy when it comes to depreciation. The longer you dally, the lower the evenual sale price would be.

The Taiwanted columns are typically full of overpriced 2ndhand stuff… I usually estimate that a pc loses 50% of its value in the first year. That’s a desktop.

And with the floor falling out of the notebook market with the introduction of netbooks…

BTW did you ever relaunch that book of yours?

[quote=“tommy525”]Hey i got the 10inch Eee PC pretty cool pretty cool. What kinda screen, specs u got? U wanna trade?

Mines the EeePc 1000hd with 1giga ram, 10.2 inch screen, 120giga hdd, only 2 weeks old. Great machine. Keyboard is 95pct of full size tho. win xp home. celeron[/quote]Good try!
Mine’s got 3 gig RAM, a 2.1 Ghz Core 2 Duo processor, a 12-inch screen, one of the best keyboards on any small notebook, and Vista Business which runs like a dream. And it weighs about the same as yours. So, thanks but no thanks.

[quote=“KenTaiwan98”]Joe,

Interesting problem. The only thing is: if you’re selling it for $, you’d be better to sell it NOW. Time is your enemy when it comes to depreciation. The longer you dally, the lower the evenual sale price would be.

The Taiwanted columns are typically full of overpriced 2ndhand stuff… I usually estimate that a pc loses 50% of its value in the first year. That’s a desktop.[/quote]Yeah, that’s what I was worried about. Though I reckon I’ve already taken the biggest hit in terms of depreciation just by having it for a few months.

[quote=“KenTaiwan98”]BTW did you ever relaunch that book of yours?[/quote]My mum liked it! But the presentation and style were too dry for most people. It would have taken a lot of work to get into a form that would have interested a publisher, and there’d have been no guarantee of any actual money at the end of it.

So mostly I chalked it up to experience (learning OpenOffice Writer really thoroughly did help me a lot, actually, and it was good to get the practice with structuring a long document).

And I chopped out the chapter on learning vocab and modified it for a website I’m doing.

What was your book? You only need a decent proposal and a sample chapter to gauge interest, y’know.

Don’t give up on it, if it was a good idea.

Use the Thinkpad to work on it!

[quote=“Buttercup”]What was your book? You only need a decent proposal and a sample chapter to gauge interest, y’know.

Don’t give up on it, if it was a good idea.

Use the Thinkpad to work on it![/quote]
Thanks, Buttercup!

I’m not sure it really was a good idea, though… It was an attempt to make American language learning theory/research (post-Krashen: lots of VanPatten and a bit of Truscott amongst others) something practical that could help teachers make language classes more involving and relevant. But it really was too much on the academic side of things. It would have needed a major change of writing style (more For Dummies, less Studies in Second Language Acquisition), and a whole lot of work on attractive page layout. Pictures would have helped, too. And it was an awkward length, at around 50,000 words.

The whole grammar learning thing can get a bit political, anyway, and it can certainly be disheartening when people realize that what they’re teaching often isn’t actually what gets learned.

I had a couple of good activities in there, but apart from that the most positive, directly useful bit was the chapter on vocab learning. And that’s what I’ve revamped for the very-soon-to-be-launched website. I like the idea of providing a bit of free info anyway.

Well, it sounds like you have the bones in there. Just twiddle it to see how you can make it more applicable to ‘the masses’.

Unconnected to your topic, but my favourite book when I was a new teacher was ‘Teaching Tenses’ by Rosemary Aitken. I understood grammar because I have a degree in linguistics but what this book did was suggest a number of contexts for presenting tenses, along with a list of all the ways that students (and teachers) screw up tenses. It also had photocopiable activities. So I think you just have to find your angle?

Yeah, maybe I should take another look at some point. Maybe I should cage the scarier research-related bits in coloured boxes at the edge of the page or something, so people don’t feel obliged to read them.

My immediate hobby-type tasks, though, are to first get the website to a launchable state, and then embark on learning Python. I don’t think there’s any reason why I shouldn’t be able to handle the fundamentals of a programming language. I was crap at BASIC on the Spectrum because I kept giving up and playing Jetpac. But I have a bit more self-discipline now.

That Teaching Tenses book looks good. If I were still teaching I’d probably buy that. Does it go into the kind of theme/rheme reasons for using passive at all? I wrote a short exercise based on that, and students seemed to “get” the passive better with that than on the old transform-an-active-sentence-into-passive kind of exercises.

Not really. I got my own stuff for that… ;o)

That’s the thing with these kind of projects. I’m thinking of my half (co-)written super aces Easypeasy learn useful Chinese book. It is pretty fab, but only exists as 78000 confused Word files…

Jia you, anyway. See, you neeed that toy!

[quote=“joesax”][quote=“tommy525”]Hey i got the 10inch Eee PC pretty cool pretty cool. What kinda screen, specs u got? U wanna trade?

Mines the EeePc 1000hd with 1giga ram, 10.2 inch screen, 120giga hdd, only 2 weeks old. Great machine. Keyboard is 95pct of full size tho. win xp home. celeron[/quote]Good try!
Mine’s got 3 gig RAM, a 2.1 Ghz Core 2 Duo processor, a 12-inch screen, one of the best keyboards on any small notebook, and Vista Business which runs like a dream. And it weighs about the same as yours. So, thanks but no thanks.

[/quote]

See? Makes you appreciate what you got ya?

If you were to sell it, what would you be hoping to get for it? I might be in the market for something used - lots of RAM and a decent size HD being my main reqs.

If those are your main reqs, and you’re not specifically interested in an ultraportable, you might be better off getting an ASUS or Acer. You get a lot of specs for your money from those companies, and to be honest the graphics capabilities are better. Thinkpads are rock solid business machines, basically.

Mine’s got a 120GB hard drive though Lenovo do a 320GB one which I’m sure a dealer would be happy to install.

If you are interested and if on reflection I did actually want to sell, I suppose 27 thousand or thereabouts. It’s hard to find out what’s a fair price because very few people are selling them second-hand (on Yahoo! Taiwan and eBay, at least). But I paid 40 for mine new, (including the extra RAM, which I bought separately), and that was in May.

Thats a deal, if I was looking to get one. Big loss for joe tho huh? Just a few months.