[throwaway81523]

I don't understand what you're getting at. I bought this X220 about a year ago on Craigslist for $100 and installed Debian on it. The main app on it whose resource use has bloated a lot since 2011 is Firefox, and that's a persistent sore point for me, since it's the web that has bloated rather than just the browser. The other stuff I use (mostly Emacs, Python, and Xchat) hasn't really bloated. I have a Thinkpad X40 (from 2004) that I used for similar purposes but its hardware eventually got too flaky.

I would say I keep a lot more data on the X220 (using a 0.5TB SATA SSD) than I could store on the X40 which had a 40GB PATA drive. It had USB2 and SD card ports though, so I could in principle have added a high capacity SD card or whatever. The X61 of the same era is still a viable machine and I think it had a SATA drive slot, which means it would be pretty usable with today's ssd's.