It gets booted up every 3 months or so to apply windows updates so it's ready to roll if this one fails. If it does, I'll repair this one as they're pretty easy to fix even with massive failures. I've got another T61 running FreeBSD which gets used regularly as well.

The battery is removed and placed in a box. It's a second hand 9-cell battery with 12 recharge cycles (Paid £20 for it!) so it's been charged to 80% and will be maintained at that where possible. I've investigated rebuilding the packs as well in the future and it's not impossibly difficult.

I'd definitely go for it. There is a vacuum of quality hardware now. Even the latest Lenovo T/X series are cruddy machines.

I'll go back to desktops if the situation doesn't improve by 2020.