I don't know what you guys are talking about?
I've used an old laptop with Windows 11 (just because I wasn't supposed to) which had Core 2 Duo T7500 (upgraded from T7100), 4GB of DDR2 RAM, GeForce 8600M GT, but with an SSD rather than HDD. Pretty usable with that thing.
Unfortunately it broke, but I think it would still be just as good.
No, the hardware died. Just randomly shut down a few times until it didn't boot nor POST anymore. The most it could do is spin a fan and output 5V to USB.
Yeah, I've seen such stuff on old forums. Unfortunately, a replacement GPU would cost around €50, and that is just not worth it to try obviously.
The CPU was €1.38 on AliExpress, so that was worth a try, but for the most part it just produced more heat
Some different GPU would probably work there, but then again, I don't know if it is a GPU issue. It wouldn't even show any drive activity when attempting to boot.
I had a t61p that suffered from it. Unfortunately I came to the same conclusion that it wasn't worth fixing. It's too bad since that was one of the last really good thinkpads.
Perhaps early Windows 11 was a bit different. Plus I disabled Superfetch and BITS which would otherwise max out CPU, and when still on HDD, that too.
Though I am not entirely sure if I also disabled something else.
It could idle at around 5% I believe.
Also, unused RAM is wasted RAM. Just because it's used doesn't mean it's unusably full. Linux too will eat up entire RAM for caching, but it can be freed when needed.