This is why I have a few ancient ThinkPads in my inventory. They have no purpose other than car work, so they're never getting screwed around with.

It's WAYYYYYYY better than starting from scratch every couple of years when I upgrade my main machine. (Also, my daily drivers are Macs, so even more reason to dedicate an old cheap machine.)

You can get old, adequate laptops for this purpose for like $100. Frequently less.

I spent a little extra for my most recent machine - $250 for a ThinkPad W530 with a quad core i7, SSD (they all got upgraded - this one has 3 SSDs in it), 32GB RAM, etc. And that was paying at least a hundred bucks extra because the last of the real IBM style thinkpad workstations.

I also have a T30 that runs the GT1/DIS flavor of SCO Unix.

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2011 M3
2006 Sierra 2500HD 4WD LBZ/Allison
2004 X5 3.0i 6MT
1995 M3 S50B32
1990 325is
1989 M3 S54B32

Hers:
1989 325iX
1996 911 Turbo