this post was submitted on 06 May 2025
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what about the X line? particularly the x250 and x260? been thinking on getting one of those for a while because of their compact size
I'm referring to semi-modern laptops you're most likely to get out of some corporation's dump of obsolete tech, but that's still usable - let's say T480 and onward. you can retrofit those with tons of RAM, cheap storage, they have capable quad-cores, etc. you can get something like a T14 Ryzen 6-core with 32 GB RAM and a 1 TB SSD in the $200 region, if you do everything yourself.
everything before that is proper old tech, with predominantly anemic dual-cores (the ones you mention have single-channel RAM) and as such are a fun tinkering project, similar to the cyber deck projects - costs a lot of money, doesn't do much. on the other side of that fence are power-hungry haswells and friends that can't be wrangled into single-digit Watt/Hour territory however hard you tried.
so if you get one of those for free, or close to it, and you have parts laying around, by all means - this is as close you can get to the bespoke PC build in the laptop world. but ixnay on bying a decade old laptop for work and/or education.
edit:
X260 vs T14, negligible size difference
What's a model you could stuff the most RAM into? I'd like a 4th Proxmox node I could replicate to and take offsite, but I don't need a pile of redundant storage on it. Something I could get 128Gb into would be awesome.
T480 can take 64 GB (2x 32 GB); no idea if more is possible. I imagine newer models could but I struggle to remember seeing 64 GB SO-DIMMs... P15 can fit four sticks so that should be possible, but them things have beefy CPUs, are rather large, and also have Nvidia graphics so dunno how low-power you can make those.
you're kinda outside of the intersection of cheap and still capable with that spec. do make a write-up if you succeed, that sounds interesting.