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I went back to using a ThinkPad from 2012

• mathiasrw 5y ago
  I really miss my x41
• TheRealDunkirk 5y ago
  > "I’ve been using this setup for over a month now, and it has been surprisingly adequate." Well, I don't know about you guys, but "surprisingly adequate" isn't really enough to get me to hit the "buy now" button.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• linpined 5y ago
  Lenovo Thinkpad really helped me throughout my college journey, the laptop never let me down.
• taubek 5y ago
  I have T460. I like the fact that it has two batteries, good casing, great touchpad (unlike the one that I've had on T440s), holes for liquid drainage... When you put SSD into it, and have 16GB of RAM I don't see it lagging behind more modern ThinkPads. In my opinion, new is not always batter :) The only thing that I miss on my T460 is better graphic adapter. I have Intel HD but even with it I can play games up to Fry Cry 4, Call od Duty 4, etc.
  • kuschku 5y ago
    I’ve got the T470 (as it has the old docking + charging port PLUS thunderbolt), modded it with the N140HCG-GQ2 panel (1080p, 100% sRGB, 400 nits, 8bit), with a 2TB NVMe SSD, 32GB of DDR4-2400MHz RAM, etc. I've got two 75Wh batteries I can switch between. Overall I get great performance even for stuff like running IDEA and a spring web app in a docker container, and I get 13h+ of battery life out of it (+10h if I switch the external battery to the second one I keep in my laptop bag). I'd wish the 30th anniversary thinkpad (coming this year) will be just an upgraded T25 with a modern ryzen processor but in every other way identical (I know, an unrealistic dream)
    • taubek 5y ago
      I have a Ultra dock for a long time now... And I know that if I ever upgrade from T460 to the T470 will be the last model for quite some time. This is the last one that fits onto my existing docking station. I must say that I prefer mechanical docks over USB/TB and other types.
• nicbou 5y ago
  Excellent writeup. I don't think I'd be happy with that setup, but I still appreciate how you explain your thinking process and why you did things this way. I switched to Mac a little over a decade ago, and since then I don't really think about my computer. It's a tool that generally just works. It's not for everyone but it really solved that issue for me.
• k4rli 5y ago
  Interestingly this CPU is only 20% faster than a newer i7 9750H ([link](https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-9750H-vs-Intel-Core-i7-3820QM/m766364vsm4339 https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-9750H-vs...)). I'd imagine under load the performance will be similar since 9750H can't run at max without overheating in a slim XPS body being next to another hot (graphics) chip.
• jgilias 5y ago
  I similarly use a Dell Latitude from 2012. After upgrading to 16GB RAM I don't have any issues with it whatsoever. At work for new devs we bought ThinkPads with Ryzen. These are in general fine, except that multiple people have this weird issue with the computer completely freezing at random times on Linux. The one person who had Windows didn't have this issue. If it weren't for this issue that would be our default buy for new hires. Now, I don't know really.
  • einr 5y ago
    > At work for new devs we bought ThinkPads with Ryzen. These are in general fine, except that multiple people have this weird issue with the computer completely freezing at random times on Linux. The one person who had Windows didn't have this issue. If it weren't for this issue that would be our default buy for new hires. Now, I don't know really. Likely an issue with the C6 power state. Try searching for "ryzen linux c6 state" and you'll find plenty of people with these issues. Try updating BIOS, disabling C6 in BIOS or with https://github.com/jfredrickson/disable-c6 https://github.com/jfredrickson/disable-c6.
    • jgilias 5y ago
      Thanks for the tip! I know that some of the guys have tried some of the fixes that can be found online with limited success, I'll forward this to them! It's a real pity though! Were it not for the freeze issue the laptops would be quite solid!
• jeffjeff2 5y ago
  "To make this machine viable in 2021, you need the CPU, RAM and SSD upgrades at the very minimum" This is not really a 2012 machine any more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus
  • hddherman 5y ago
    I'd argue against it, the core of the machine that makes the laptop a laptop is still the same.
    • Kudos 5y ago
      Does the ship of Theseus become not a ship?
  • rgoulter 5y ago
    My favourite example of Ship of Theseus is the joke about the axe which has had its head and handle replaced: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIdUEzQKyJo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIdUEzQKyJo
  • jychang 5y ago
    This DEFINITELY doesn't count as Ship of Theseus. All those parts are designed to be replaceable on the Thinkpad. If you really want to talk about Ship of Theseus-ing a Thinkpad, the hardcore guys have literally ripped out the motherboard and installed a completely different motherboard with a modern i7 CPU. These "frankenpads" include the X62 (Broadwell CPU and motherboard in an old X61), T70 (Kaby Lake CPU in a T60), X210 (Kaby Lake R CPU in a X200 body). They also rip out the LCD and replace it with a modern IPS display. They sometimes also rip out the keyboard to replace it with an older keyboard- T420 keyboard in a T430 is common.
    • xondono 5y ago
      > the hardcore guys have literally ripped out the motherboard and installed a completely different motherboard with a modern i7 CPU. So, a CPU upgrade? How is that not what OP mentions? The LCD upgrade is also on the wishlist..
• shusaku 5y ago
  I don’t think the author is alone in keeping an older thinkpad running by upgrading its components, that’s part of why they’re such popular machines with tech people. I have to say though, his complaints about the newer machines doesn’t resonate with me, my T495s works great (the only issue is the awful Lenovo buying process)
  • alcasa 5y ago
    I honestly feel like there were some issues in their specific hardware selection. Linux shouldn't be that bad on a recent Thinkpad system
• hddherman 5y ago
  In case my internet connection fails, here's a Wayback Machine snapshot: https://web.archive.org/web/20220110074515/https://ounapuu.ee/posts/2022/01/09/why-i-went-back-to-using-a-thinkpad-from-2012/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220110074515/https://ounapuu.e... I really appreciate your feedback, thoughts and own experiences that relate to this post!
  • bradfa 5y ago
    I still use my T420s as my daily driver laptop. I'd like to get something with a better screen and faster CPU but it's still reliable so it's hard to justify. What batteries have you had good luck with? My main and ultrabay batteries are both down to around 50% of original new capacity now.
  • microtonal 5y ago
    I had similar experiences with the T14 AMD that I used for over half a year. On Linux the Trackpad would often not come back after sleep. Also, the battery would drain very quickly in S3 suspend. The laptop would take off during video calls (though the fan noise was definitely not as bad as with many Intel models). In the end it was really a thousand of paper cuts, especially with Linux, despite the laptop being certified with Linux. The hardware itself was pretty ok and worked fairly well with Windows (I just don't like Windows). In the end I went back to MacBooks. First an M1 Air, now a MBP 14" with an an M1 Pro. They are insanely fast, while staying cool. The fan on the Pro only spins up during long builds, but even then it's barely audible. If you don't like macOS, getting an old(er) ThinkPad is probably the best option.
    • zibzab 5y ago
      Note that Linux certification applies only to specific distros/versions. Ubuntu LTS works flawless on my thinkpad but some stuff break on Ubuntu 21.10.
  • fsflover 5y ago
    All the same advantages, plus 64 GB RAM, hardware kill switches, thin metal design, Coreboot and no compromises: https://puri.sm/products/librem-14 https://puri.sm/products/librem-14
• causi 5y ago
  Do something fun with the ExpressCard34 slot. Shame it isn't a 54 slot. You'd be able to get an expresscard bluetooth mouse. They're comfier than you'd expect and incredibly convenient. They even charge while stored in the slot.
  • alcasa 5y ago
    Or use it for an eGPU connector, I believe there were also options to use it as additional storage
    • zibzab 5y ago
      There is a community (on Reddit ?) using X200/201 with homemade eGPUs to play AAA games.
• bungle 5y ago
  > The CPU innovation stagnation between 2012-2017 has resulted in 4 cores still being an acceptable low-end CPU in early 2022 I recently got M1 Max MacBook, and I was expecting a huge jump from my 2010 Mac Pro, but on my day-to-day work. It is barely noticeable, despite the raving reviews of M1. Perhaps for me it is not about things getting obsolete, but more of that my own needs on CPU/GPU performance were pretty much fulfilled in 2010. I am a programmer, so my needs are not that high. Or perhaps it is that after 12 years, the laptops are now on bar with desktops. I think the biggest improvements for me in last 20 years have been the SSDs and then the NVMe.
  • alcasa 5y ago
    If you mean Mac Pro and not Macbook Pro I wouldn't be that suprised. Single thread performance is mainly dominated by clock speed and possibly instruction set improvements. Having a much higher TDP there isn't much magic you can work to make a Laptop faster than a recentish desktop system.
  • maccard 5y ago
    > I am a programmer, so my needs are not that high This isn't true for all programmers. I'm a programmer, and until 3 years ago a good chunk of my day was spent waiting for compiles to finish. > Or perhaps it is that after 12 years, the laptops are now on bar with desktops. I think the biggest improvements for me in last 20 years have been the SSDs and then the NVMe. Not even remotely close. I have an AMD threadripper [0] in a desktop PC under my desk that I use for development. This is a mainstream, readily available x64 processor with 32 cores (and hyperthreading) that can sustain just 3.8GHz for at least 30 minutes (I've not pushed it any farther than that because I've needed to). Based on PassMark benchmarks [1], the threadripper is substantially quicker than the M1 Max. [0] https://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-ryzen-threadripper-3970x https://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-ryzen-threadripper-3... [1] https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/AMD-Ryzen-Threadripper-3970X-vs-Apple-M1-Max-10-Core-3200-MHz/3623vs4585 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/AMD-Ryzen-Threadripper-...
    • openplatypus 5y ago
      Oh, can you share more? What is your programming environment? I am debating a move to desktop/workstation with desktop CPU to support smoother Scala/lots-of-containers development experience. Pandemic made laptops less appealing. With digital nomadism being a question mark for some. Yes, I do know some still continue to practice this lifestyle. I can be only jealous :)
• ya_throw 5y ago
  Does this mean that "things that have survived for 10 years are more durable than average", or "in the last 10 years, we have become unable to make useful, durable laptops"? If it's the latter, then I can hear the footsteps of the Anti-Singularity getting ever closer....
  • ciphol 5y ago
    We're capable, companies have just decided there isn't a market for it. Or else there are still useful durable laptops being produced, but not this model or this company.
    • ya_throw 5y ago
      What's the difference between the two? Especially when the product in question requires the co-ordination of 10s (probably 100s) of thousands of engineers, designers, and operatives, as well as a mass-market able to make the initial investment worth it.
• jillesvangurp 5y ago
  I'm all for frugality but that seems like a lot of compromises for what is this person's main work laptop. Cool that it works; but why have a slow workhorse like that? I picked up a Samsung Galaxybook a few weeks ago. Nice core i5 system on a chip thing with Iris XE gpu. Runs cool including when under load and it's fast enough. Driver support seems decent in Linux. Even the graphics are quite alright. I played some steam games with it even. Nothing recent though. The touchpad is a multitouch thing that sort of replicates what a decent macbook would be capable off (but with way less precision). The keyboard is alright and they even squeezed in a numeric pad. It has 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD. Decent battery life too. With Manjaro it's quite a nice work laptop. Not bad for 700 Euro. At that price (which was a black Friday discount), why bother patching up a ten year old laptop. Not worth the expenses on the parts IMHO.
  • zwaps 5y ago
    For one thing (for me, at least): The keyboard. I have yet to see a good keyboard on a modern laptop, and I use a lot of different ones. Some people do not care, but I do. There's some keyboards that are "still decent", but all of them are progressively getting worse. Well, they say that Mac keyboards are getting better again, but I don't like their zero-keytravel style in the first place, not even in the ones that were considered good. Thinkpad T400 roundabout was a good keyboard in my view.
    • Joeri 5y ago
      As an m1 macbook owner I would say the new mac keyboard is good for a low travel keyboard, but not good when compared to thinkpad keyboards, especially the older 1.8mm and up key travel keyboards. There is only so much you can do to compensate for a lack of key travel.
    • justsomehnguy 5y ago
      > The keyboard But what about the keyboard /layout/? My rant at [0] To clarify it somewhat, currently I have a laptop with two Fn keys. I rarely use the right one, but it feels very organic when I do. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29807256 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29807256
• iamevn 5y ago
  A couple months ago I pulled my x220 that I hadn't used in 3 years out of the closet and got it all updated to do some hobby programming while visiting parents. My only other laptops were a work machine (X1 Carbon, I want to say from 2019) that I didn't want to travel with and a Surface Go that I didn't want to wrangle into having a decent dev environment. When I booted it up, I checked the most recent entry in pacman's logs: $ tail /var/log/pacman.log -n1 [2018-08-24 12:40] [PACMAN] Running 'pacman -R aur/ino' Somehow the upgrade didn't completely hose everything. It just took a bit of finagling in the form of looking through any packages that gave errors (errors like cyclic dependency stuff and conflicts from bad use of pip) and uninstalling those that I didn't see a need for or switching them to the package manager instead of pip. About an hour of babysitting it and I had a completely updated and working Arch setup. Using it was surprisingly pleasant, I think the most painful thing was initial builds for some large Haskell projects were slow but subsequent builds were tolerable. Also the original screen, while nicely visible with the matte surface, has a painfully low resolution of 1366x768 and so few websites are happy with half of that width now that everything has huge margins. Probably the most important thing was that it was mine (even though I haven't done the sorts of mods in TFA) in a way that my work laptop and the windows machines I'd been using outside of work could never be. (I do love how sturdy it is. Especially with the slice battery that almost doubles the thickness and gives it enough juice for hours)
  • unixhero 5y ago
    Well of course you fixed your arch install in a matter of an hour, you're a Haskell developer.
    • laumars 5y ago
      I’m not a Haskell developer and Arch is my goto Linux precisely because it’s on the of easiest distros to fix when things go wrong. YMMV but the snide remark is definitely unjustified.
      • idealmedtech 5y ago
        That's been my experience with Arch as well. I've only seen a handful of actual breakages in my time (using consistently since 2016), and there's _always_ a good discussion with a manual fix available within a few hours, or a few days if you want to stick to official update channels. Plus KDE Plasma has become such a joy to use! I repurposed my T530 as a media center with a wireless keyboard and it's been a fantastic experience
• jarenmf 5y ago
  I thought about doing the same for my T430 but found out it'll cost me ~400$ and several hours so I ended up buying a second hand t470s for 300$. I like my T430 but it is really heavy and bulky and the display quality is awful (really bad viewing angles).
• josefrichter 5y ago
  I do miss the track point controller. It’s kinda like hardware vim: difficult to learn to work with, so majority of people don’t. But once you do, it’s an absolute killer.
  • djtango 5y ago
    This might be blasphemous but after being thinkpad exclusively for the past 13 years (and my first thinkpad was in 98) but I find myself using the touchpad more and more when I'm not on my external trackpoint keyboard. Not quite sure why, might be due to slightly dodgy Linux experiences (x240 dodgy buttons and then now my sensitivity on X1 gen 9 is a bit touch and go) That said for regular point and click the touchpad is good enough. Tho when working there is no substitute for not leaving the homerow
    • josefrichter 5y ago
      It might be multi-finger gestures maybe? I use those a LOT on touchpad for scrolling, panning and dragging. Back when I was using Touchpoint, the trackpads weren’t capable of this, if I remember correctly. And they were like 2x3 cm in size anyway.
• uwagar 5y ago
  • the_only_law 5y ago
    Any particular reason why? I’ve heard people complain about newer ThinkPads, but haven’t heard much negative about older ones, such as the one in this article. They do seem to be very popular, and unfortunately for some operating systems they’re one of the few “safe” options with hardware support. I personally haven’t found any particular laptop brand or model I particularly loved.
    • uwagar 5y ago
• FullyFunctional 5y ago
  I have a similar story about my 2007(?) 17" MacBook Pro, back from when Apple made serviceable products. This MBP have had many owners before again circling back to me. I have opened it up more times than I can remember and replaced most replaceable things, like swapping the optical drive for a 2nd hard disk (and back again), and even replacing the entire screen plus assembly. "Old" hardware is totally usable for much of what I do today, but the number #1 thing that I would miss is the modern displays which are just so much kinder on my ailing eyes. Amusingly the keyboards are often better on my old devices, but the trackpads are not. EDIT: the processor is 64-bit. I was thinking of my ThinkPad T42p (another heavily serviced unit).
• taffronaut 5y ago
  I had a visitor over the holidays who needed to work but didn't have a laptop. I had 2x old T420 (released in 2011) so I combined the RAM and did a fresh OS install. My only hassle was finding a DP cable. Other than doubling the RAM, this was still a stock machine from 2011. CPU benchmark scores for this T420 are comparable/better than sub-£400 new x86 laptops available at big box stores which was the other short-term option. Our visitor has had no issues with the T420 for Zoom calls, Chrome and other general stuff. I sold the RAM-less T420 and was informed that it was up and running with fresh RAM at its new home.
  • jcelerier 5y ago
    To be fair the sub-400 laptops are nearly the same in 2021 that you could find in 2011. Dual core with 1366x768 is still pretty common.
    • taffronaut 5y ago
      Sure. We're saying the same thing in different ways. A 2011 reasonable spec i5 laptop from my trash pile is still at least as useable for day-today tasks as a cheap new machine in 2021.
  • herbst 5y ago
    I've used a T420 as daily driver until just recently. It went travelling around the world with me, fell from rather high places, got wet more than once and much more. My new 460s is mostly just better because it's lighter. Performance plus is only noticeable in games and such stuff.
• NGRhodes 5y ago
  I like to buy ex-corporate ~5 year old Thinkpads, get from a seller who gives atleast 6 months warranty, put new batteries in and they are usually far better in every way than anything new for the same price. Am currently very happy with my T460S, runs Linux or Win10 great. My previous machines that the kids use for school work and Roblox are x250 and x220, and previous to that I have an X200 and a T61, that all lasted atleast 5 years in my ownership, over 10 years old before they were sold on. I have noticed since my X200 a slow and steady decline in toughness (I presume in exchange for compactness). You do have to pick carefully, some models have terrible trackpads, often the base LCD screens are terrible for brightness and viewing angle, so you need to ensure you get the upgraded ones (eg IPS and/or higher resolution).
  • bener 5y ago
    I would vouch for this approach too. Ex lease laptops are really cheap, I've got a gen4 x1 carbon for easy carry daily use, a t460s at home, and so many of my customers love their ex lease Lenovos.
  • DoingIsLearning 5y ago
    > I like to buy ex-corporate ~5 year old Thinkpads, get from a seller who gives atleast 6 months warranty I am curious if this a US thing only. I mean, I've heard of company vehicles in second hand market but never company laptops. In my experience all these company laptops get decommisioned by IT never to remove any data, but I never really considered what happens at End-of-life for those. A few questions: 1. Where do you find these retailers? 2. Where do you find suppliers selling new batteries for old devices? (all of my previous attempts at finding replacement batteries for laptops and e-readers always resulted in very poor performance or even faulty battery packs) edit: formating paragraphs for questions
    • vurpo 5y ago
      I live in Finland, and simply by Googling in Finnish I can find several companies reselling used company laptops, and there's at least one local one that I can physically go to (I've bought a used monitor from there, and they always have stacks of ThinkPads in the store when I go in).
• knaik94 5y ago
  This laptop doesn't have a dedicated GPU and while I love my old thinkpad, a third generation i7 isn't powerful enough to do 4k h265 decoding and physically lacks any hardware acceleration for vp8, vp9 and both 8 and 10 bit h265. 1080p content is fine but with 4k it will start to struggle. This author doesn't seem to be using the laptop for multimedia consumption, but I would like to bring this limitation up for anyone looking to run this generation of thinkpad as a daily driver. If someone was planning on doing screen recording, I would strongly urge them to pick a newer generation of processor that can do hardware accelerated video encoding. A 720p webcam is fine, but seems like the limit as well since the author had to drop the desktop resolution to 720p to use OBS screen recording functionally. It's a great machine though and I completely understand why someone would feel those tradeoffs are worth looking past. I miss my w520 sometimes. I have never felt so at home with another machine.
  • vetinari 5y ago
    Well, it is not much equipped to output the 4K either; the internal display is 1600x900, you can upgrade it to full hd and the external output can do 4k@30 at most, even the thunderbolt-equipped model.
• hpd 5y ago
  Funny story, I'm actually looking to make the opposite switch t430 -> t480. My t430 is already equipped with 16gb ram and modded EC so I can use cheap 3rd party batteries and the OG 7 row keyboard instead of the trash 6 row island keyboard. There are still some upgrades to be made like i7 QM cpu, and a 1600x900 IPS screen, but I just can't justify the costs anymore. The reason for moving to t480 soon is that I'll be doing the t25 frankenpad mod solely just for the 7 row keyboard. Better power effiecient cpu, nvme and high res screen is a cherry on top. So far my thinkpad experience has been superb, and both my machines t410 + t430 have survived many drops and various liquid spills(water/coffee/alcohol) and besides replacing the keyboard, I had 0 issues. Hopefully the t480 will be similar experience.
• gigel82 5y ago
  Let's circle back in a few months; I too feel nostalgic when I visit my dad's and play some classic games on the old faithful PC from my youth (still rocking a 17'' Trinitron CRT). But after a few hours reality hits since I use my PCs nowadays to actually... get stuff done. I can't imagine that PC would be very useful for any productivity work, at most (frustratingly slow) browsing.
  • toomim 5y ago
    Nah, the upgraded 4-core T430 is plenty fast and very productive. You'd be surprised. I used a dual-core upgraded T430 for quite a while. The problem was actually the battery life. 2-3 hours just doesn't compare to a M1 Macbook's 13 hours.
• bjarneh 5y ago
  After upgrading the display, CPU, disk, RAM, fan, battery it's a bit click-baity to say you've gone back to a 2012 ThinkPad - but interesting read non the less. What surprised me the most is that Lenovo ships something as annoying as a loud fan (easily replaceable even for a home tinkerer). Of course they save a few pennies per laptop; but no laptop can ever be good if it's noisy. That was one of the main reasons why I bought an X301 ThinkPad many years ago, even when it fanned like crazy it was very quiet. But the clever design of the original ThinkPad's was starting to fade already then; the X301 actually had it's speakers on top. So you could spill liquid on it, unless you happened to spill it on top of one of your top mounted speakers of course. I've also gone through a few ThinkPad's over the years, and ever since they stopped being IBM; they seem to loose more and more of the "premium feel" for every generation. Especially the keyboard is way better on my old T40 then on the one I use right now (T14).
  • knaik94 5y ago
    Thinkpad sold that model with 16gbs as an upgrade while buying the laptop at the time. SSDs needing to be upgraded has also been recommended since that time. And the processor update was simply maxing out the processor upgrade from that generation. It was available on the workstation version of the thinkpad in the same generation. The i7-3820QM release date is 04/23/2012. A new SSD doesn't mean current gen speeds, the internal and the caddy are still limited to sata 3 speeds. It's a very 2012 machine, a very nice 2012 machine.
    • bjarneh 5y ago
      True; I just feel that most titles are a bit exaggerated these days to sound more sensational then they really are. If I were to write a book, I'd gladly use an old ThinkPad due to the nice keyboard. But I hope I don't write a blog like this if I do: "Why I went back to my 2003 ThinkPad" :-)
  • xxs 5y ago
    "upgrading the display, CPU, disk, RAM, fan, battery it's a bit click-baity to say you've gone back to a 2012 ThinkPad - but interesting read non the less." That's the good part - it's possible, and it's serviceable. My spouse uses a 10y (almost 11y) laptop, it has pretty much everything changed & upgraded. CPU, RAM, keyboard, CD->SSD, HDD->SSD, battery, fan, wifi 801.1 b/g -> ac+bluetooth. The discrete GPU is not replaceable, of course.
• sam_lowry_ 5y ago
  I gave up on a Macbook Pro to use a Thinkpad T420s, the last one with the traditional keyboard. Aside from maxing out the memory and the SSD, I only upgraded the LCD panel to a better one ordered on AliExpress.
  • zibzab 5y ago
    Am I the only person who is just fine with the new keyboard? Obviously the ones on ideapad and whatnot are not in the same league, but the keyboard on T450s and T460s are pretty awesome.
    • lproven 5y ago
      I've been discussing just this with the folks in reddit /r/thinkpad recently. There are lots on your side, but I see lots of upvotes for the new-keyboard-haters too. For me, the 220/420/520 are the last good Thinkpads. I have all 3 and use them all regularly. Anything after that, IMHO the chiclet keyboards are unusable trash. They've got even worse since the ?30 generation and now are right down there with Dell and other cheapo glued-together skip-ware. (Skip = dumpster in USian.)
      • sam_lowry_ 5y ago
        I would not dismiss Dell so quickly. Screens in their 7000 series of the same era were much better. Keyboards were trash.
• KronisLV 5y ago
  Oh, a ThinkPad T400 series, one of those models was actually my first laptop at work in my current company (joined about 4 years ago)! Albeit it was a bit dated even then, it was still a pleasure to use and i never really felt like i needed to switch to something newer, maybe just for more RAM. Though my current ThinkPad has a larger screen, which is nice too! That said, 24 GB felt enough for me throughout 2021, even for enterprise Java projects. Honestly, as far as laptops go, it feels to me that the various types of ThinkPad laptops are some of the best out there - they feel sturdy, the build quality is good, the driver support is generally pretty good (only had problems with display drivers once in a newer model) and the keyboards are the best that i've tried in any laptop to date (outside of Apple devices, i guess). I've also been meaning to look into the Fujitsu Lifebook series of laptops for personal devices, but currently can't really afford them. Are there any other sturdy but powerful laptops that the people here would like to recommend?
• iammjm 5y ago
  I own a T430 myself and have enjoyed using it for a couple of years already. Very durable, reliable and upgradable - plus its just fun to use. I removed the CD Rom and put an SSD in its place; upgraded to 8GB Ram; got a GTX 1050ti as an external GPU running and connected it together with an external monitor, keyboard and mouse to a docking station. That way I can use it on the go and then just put it on the docking station to have all the peripherals connected/disconnected easily. I could also update the processor but it would require spending more than 100€ on the chip and an improved cooling which I dont think justifies a minor boost in performance.
  • kinow 5y ago
    Does the external GPU works alright? I have a T530 with a NVidia that I use dual monitor. But it's old, and Blender doesn't use it for rendering. Been thinking about one of these little egpu adapters, but don't know anyone that used it actually.
    • bubblethink 5y ago
      The gpus from that generation are quite shit. Nonetheless, the igpu version is better for battery life and linux. I changed my motherboard from w530 to t530 (igpu version) to get rid of nvidia.
• einpoklum 5y ago
  Even before reading the post itself, the answer was obvious: --- Keyboard, keyboard, and again keyboard. --- That is simply the most important feature of a laptop one uses for work involving writing: Correspondence, note taking and such. Also for people who don't like playing around with their mouse that much. Sadly, laptop manufacturers have degraded keyboards further and further over the years in the quest for thinner laptop heights. And while I can appreciate _some_ people need thinner laptops, many, and perhaps most of us - don't. It's a work instrument for us, not a fashion accessory. Why has it been 10 years since a laptop was last out with a decent keyboard?
• amiga-workbench 5y ago
  I've been hanging around on an X201t for almost a decade now, but finally upgraded to an X270 last October. Its the last X series machine they sold with non-soldered RAM. So far things have been pretty good, Fedora works almost perfectly out of the box, but there is a nasty issue where the third party 65Wh battery I have causes the laptops embedded controller to scream that the CPU is overheating. I've had to write a script to squelch that to stop the thing from throttling down to 400mhz all the time. I've had the thing in pieces, keyboard, trackpad, palmrest, lcd and RAM have all been replaced and the build quality really pales compared to the older machines, there is no magnesium midframe here, its plastic everywhere. But at least I can get a solid 10 hours work out of the battery, and decent quality IPS panels are widely available. I'm not sure what to do once thing thing reaches the end of its life, all the replacement models are going to have every component soldered down, the batteries are all internal and not hot-swappable. Grim, I had might as well buy a Macbook.
• throwaway81523 5y ago
  I'm using an X220 which is even older than the T430. It is on its last legs and its keyboard doesn't work at all (using an external) but I feel that it is fast enough in terms of cpu, storage, etc. I do some programming on it but it is not a hardcore dev box. I use remote servers for that. I don't feel like I need multiple disk drives: if I want to back up on the same machine, 1TB microsdxc cards are a thing (in fact I only need 256gb or so). I need to replace the X220 quite soon and there are way fewer used Thinkpads on Craigslist than there used to be (any vintage, not just that era). I don't know why that is. But I agree with the article that the newer stuff is way too crapified and that the 2012 era machines are about the best ones to use right now. Older ones were even more solidly constructed, but had DDR2 memory, considerably slower processors, etc. So I will probably look for another X220. (X230 is similar and a little newer, but has the silly 6 row keyboard instead of the nicer old 7 row one).
  • mindslight 5y ago
    The X230 and X220 keyboards are compatible. You could get a new X220 keyboard to solve your immediate problem, and then after you find a suitable X230, swap in the keyboard.
    • throwaway81523 5y ago
      Thanks, that's nice to know about the swappability. I don't know if my X220 keyboard issue is with the keyboard itself or on the motherboard side. I inspected the tiny ribbon cable connector pretty carefully and didn't see any problems with it. The symptom was that a few of the keys stopped working, then more of them, and finally it seems all of them. Maybe I can try temporarily swapping in another keyboard. I think I have one that I can try.
• TheFattestNinja 5y ago
  I have been using as my only machine a T530 uninterrupted (think 10h/day uptime) since Nov 2012, both as a desktop replacement and to carry it around. I had to replace its motherboard recently but it was my fault as I put it in too enclosed of a space and overheated/burned it. Aside from a bit of fan noise, it's still going strong. It's definitely underspecced wtr to graphics nowadays, but still able to run things like League of Legends smoothly with just the integrated chip. Happy to answer questions about it if anyone is interested.
  • kinow 5y ago
    My only machine too since... 2015 I think? Replaced an old Dell inspiron, been running great with containers, IntelliJ, Jupyter Lab, dual monitor. Only Blender 3.0 doesn't work too well due to the old version of cuda. Other than that, never had any issues.
  • jrockway 5y ago
    Does League have demanding hardware requirements? It's older than that laptop.
    • pdimitar 5y ago
      Can't give you a good informed answer but I've seen friends play League on like 8 different machines -- all very unimpressive in terms of specs. I have to say, League is one of the very best games out there in terms of optimization and modest sipping of resources. Shame about the community though; fairly toxic and demanding (IMO) and that's why I'll never play it. But the game itself is a technical marvel.
• openplatypus 5y ago
  I love these projects. I have T430 with 16GB of RAM. Sadly, it is i5 version. So far: - replaced fan to DELTA - refreshed thermal paste - added Samsung 860 EVO Pro - acquired (yet to install) USB-C charging port Until I replace the CPU, it is not good enough for Scala development. That said, compared to AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 4700U and 32 GB in ThinkPad T14 it falls short quite fast. T430, X230 and T61p hold a special place in my heart, but these are dated platforms. Once to start getting to media processing, paying attention to battery life, CPU performance per Watt, etc you will look for modern architecture. I am personally pleased about move to Performance/Efficiency cores architecture. Not all tasks are created equal :)
• black_puppydog 5y ago
  I find it funny how people seem to fixate so much on the fact that the author upgraded various components to say the title is misleading. As someone with apparently similar requirements, the take-away from this should be this: Even though significant work is required to keep these old machines working, some people prefer to do so. Crucially, they prefer it not because they love tinkering, but simply because the value propositions of 2021/2022 hardware doesn't look better. As someone running a non-upgradeable Dell nightmare XPS13 2in1 with a nice display, but horrible everything-else, I can relate. I've been looking at recent models lately and find it pretty bleak.
  • y4mi 5y ago
    There are upgradeable options though. The framework Laptop to name the most hyped current option for example.
    • fho 5y ago
      The problem with these projects is that they are all the hype for a while and after the hype dies down you are left with laptop that is only in theory upgradable.
      • Dylan16807 5y ago
        You make it sound like it's a kickstarter.
        • notRobot 5y ago
          I love frame.work as a concept, but it's definitely not a "proven" concept at the moment. The company could very well go under or choose not to support upgrading the laptop.
          • cehrlich 5y ago
            Even assuming Framework shuts down tomorrow and destroys their existing stock of replacement parts and the specs for making new ones, I would argue that you can at the very least assume permanent availability of RAM, SSD, Display (it uses a commodity panel), fan, and battery (there are knockoff batteries for much more obscure laptops). I would assume that keyboards, trackpads, etc. will also be available as some laptops bite the dust and are scavenged for parts. Whether the motherboard/CPU will actually be upgradeable obviously remains to be seen. The 11th Gen CPUs get a lot of flak, but they have good single-core performance which will make them suitable for general use for a long time. It's at least equally upgradeable as the first ThinkPads with soldered on CPUs, which by today's standards is still pretty good - and if framework deliver on their promises, then it will be even better. But either way the baseline isn't bad.
• vpilcx 5y ago
  That's so weird because I'm currently using the T420. My desktop has basically stopped working so I had to start using this one with Ubuntu 18 something. Pretty disingenuous to say you're using an old Thinkpad when you've upgraded the RAM to max and everything else. I haven't (4gb currently) and it can be pretty frustrating. YouTube and other video sites will start to freeze up after awhile and forget about multiple tabs of videos because that will just speed up the process. My browser gets too slow on certain web games. Ultimate Paperclip, now that I've progressed to the end, is unplayable. Otherwise though, outside of gaming, the switch from Windows to Ubuntu has been relatively painless and unnoticeable. I tried doing some music production with LMMS and VMPK. For some reason, the audio just isn't registering even though it works fine for all other applications. But not too bad considering it was my last resort before having to buy a new computer or spend money trying to repair the old one.
• crypt1d 5y ago
  Seems like lots of IT folks have fond memories of the T420/T430 (and X220) era. I personally think it was the golden age of the Thinkpad line, going back perhaps to T40/T42, it was some of the best laptops I ever worked on. No other laptop has come close to getting it right since. It was really the perfect combination of build quality, modularity and performance that won me over. I'm now on the new M1 Pro Mac and while the battery life is amazing, I felt a lot more confident working on my T420 back in the day. And yes I tried the X1 Carbon/Extreme lines, and I wasn't sold on them either.
  • formerly_proven 5y ago
    I've used an X200 for ten years (I bought it used with 3 years on the clock) and I'm actually surprised that the X200 is kind of glorified nowadays as one of the best Thinkpads ever, because back then the X200 was decried for its numerous build quality issues (palmrest, right half of the keyboard, thermals, noise etc.). The X200 is of course build fairly well compared to the more recent models, but that's hardly surprising. From my PoV the Thinkpad series has been constantly and consistently reducing build quality for at least 15 years. (That being said most of the issues the X200 has had were just things that feel poorly, it won't fall apart)
    • jkepler 5y ago
      I still use my x200s, though its battery barely holds a charge, so I use it docked with am external monitor, as a desktop machine. Most of my work is writing, so no issues with its lower CPU compared with newer machines.
• montroser 5y ago
  Check out the https://frame.work https://frame.work laptop. Repairable, upgradable, beautiful 3:2 screen. This one checks all the boxes...
  • hffftz 5y ago
    Looks nice but too bad it doesn't have any AMD options.
• throw8932894 5y ago
  10 years used laptops are wonky. Maybe nice DIY project but definitely not as main workstation for travels. And if you want multiple 4k screens or newer peripherals... My current setup is Dell XPS 13 from 2015 and portable Deskmini PC with Ryzen 7 5700g. This laptop is pretty hackeable ultrabook, over years I replaced chassis, keyboard and some ports. But it has only 16GB RAM and supports only 1x4k@30Hz, so it will be soon replaced by Framework laptop (64GB RAM, 4x4k screens). And Deskmini is tiny 2kg PC with great desktop CPU. I found all high end laptops to be rather expensive and with insufficient cooling for constant load. With this I can have proper desktop performance in laptop sized package. So my final setup will be two computers, with 12 cores and 128GB RAM and weight of only 5KG. I can use 7x4K screens and have total 20 TB of integrated storage. All cheap hardware with no crazy hacks.
• G3rn0ti 5y ago
  1.5 years ago I went ahead and upgraded my retired workplace laptop, a Fujitsu Siemens Lifebook E743 from 2014: - bigger 500 GB SSD, resized system partition (no re-install necessary) - replaced the dual core CPU with a quad core model (Intel Core i7-3612QM, 35W) - replaced its really crappy keyboard with a backlit one from a later model that fitted https://www.facebook.com/gernot.kieseritzky/posts/10223665918984357?__cft__[0]=AZXrCOPjeaRbamy-JkC-73sdOvzmS8DyLyoe_wqUHMZ8mqt_yZNE1K4x1xGMx_I7RxHNlkubIjxGoirdAwk_biCkojTFlr48xdjbj9iOl-ZllJTI951yZl0lRbxyU7GW01M&__tn__=%2CO%2CP-R https://www.facebook.com/gernot.kieseritzky/posts/1022366591... All in all the upgrade cost me about €200 (about US$230) and the laptop is still up and running, used daily for home office and private stuff (including streaming of retro games on Twitch). Replacement batteries are easy to come by but we still had some unused spares at my workplace. Unlike the Thinkpads these laptops are kind of an underdog when it comes to its modding community. But these things are actually quite hackable. I wonder if I could have even tried to plug in a 45W model of the same CPU mentioned in TFA to get even more processing power and maybe modded the cooler that is a bit too loud for my taste.
  • _trampeltier 5y ago
    Also a nice thing on Fujitsu Notebooks is, the power adapter stayed the same since many many generations. I can use the same adapter for my 2006, 2014 and 2020 Fujitsu notebook. And yes, I upgraded also the two older models with more Ram and SSD.
• zwaps 5y ago
  I miss my Thinkpad T400-420s I especially miss the keyboard and that particular pointstick (with those buttons). It is really weird that since then, keyboards just have been getting worse. Build quality otherwise has improved, especially on the lower end. But when it comes to keyboards, it seems no one has found a good solution except ye olde IBM engineers.
• jokoon 5y ago
  Same thing, I bought a low quality L-series thinkpad, without a GPU. GPUs need a lot of cooldown, and thus a lot of space, and laptops can't be well cooled. I upgraded to a SSD, I can still add some RAM if I want. Laptops can't be war machines, unless you have deep pockets, and it will be difficult to cool it down.
• yokoprime 5y ago
  I have a T430 from late 2011 which is still in use. I've replaced the battery and upgraded the RAM. One glaring issue this author only mentions in passing is the screen, which in my opinion is a complete dealbreaker for using this laptop for any sort of daily driver tasks like media consumption and web browsing. Even for its day the screen was poor. I'm not talking about the resolution, but color rendition and contrast. Its a complete pig. I run arch (btw) on mine and use it as a troubleshooting machine which i can carry with me and throw around without worrying too much, but i would not use it as my main computer.
• Kessler83 5y ago
  For any laptop, I want at least full hd 15 inch screen, the very best keyboard (centered, without numpad) and a trackpoint. If it comes without dedicated graphics, that's a bonus. This means a thinkpad, afaik. So unless I wanna spend a fortune on the new Thinkpad P1 (I don't!), I think the best option is a modded T530. I installed a 1920x1080 screen with great color, upgraded RAM to 16G, put in two SSDs and retrofitted a T420 keyboard (you need some scotch, a nail clipper and a BIOS hack). This is enough for my purposes---for now. But you can also replace the heat sink and the processor using parts from a W530. Reportedly, this might also let you upgrade to 32G ram. So I'm confident that I'll be able to use this machine until I can either afford a P1, or lenovo puts out something even better.
• javchz 5y ago
  My main Laptop it's a T430, and from time to time I use a T440p. It's amazing how you can disassemble the whole thing with only one screwdriver and upgrade almost everything. The T420 keyboard mod it's what's stopping me from upgrading to a newer model. Don't get me wrong it's not mechanical or anything, but has the comfiest layout I have tried on any laptop so far. There are some drawbacks: * New batteries are rare * The display it's bad * After Covid, it's expensive to get replacements parts like plastics bezels or motherboards. * The GPU or iGPU it's bad. Gonna be a problem in a few years with how demanding web pages are. Forget about video editing or gaming beyond simple things. * New Linux kernels could drop support for some of the drivers in the future. This thing's great, but it's old. In any case, if I upgrade to anything in the future, it will probably be a framework laptop. M1 Macbooks are probably the best cost-benefit laptop out there for a lot of people (battery, display, cpu power), and I kinda want to try one. But I don't feel comfortable voting with my wallet for Apple's practices, especially with how hostile they have been with the "right to repair" movement.
  • zhdc1 5y ago
    > The display it's bad You can retrofit a 1080p lcd with a controller board and a little effort. > M1 Macbooks are probably the best cost-benefit laptop out there for a lot of people (battery, display, cpu power), and I kinda want to try one. But I don't feel comfortable voting with my wallet for Apple's practices, especially with how hostile they have been with the "right to repair" movement. I'm not a particular fan of Apple either, but the M1 Macbook was the first laptop that made me want to permanently switch from my old x220. It's simply that much better.
    • salamandersauce 5y ago
      Faster hardware maybe but I think the ThinkPad has other benefits, like being easy to repair and upgrade. I'm extremely frustrated at my 2018 MBP, I stupidly went with the cheaper 256GB option and really wish I could just pop in a 1TB drive. Plus once the honeymoon period with macOS ended I'm now essentially stuck with an operating system I've grown to hate as support for Linux is dismal even with the latest kernel 3+ years on (No keyboard, trackpad, WiFi, Audio, suspend support plus more little issues!). An x220 or other ThinkPad should be very well supported. M1 macs have more interest from Linux devs right now but I'd be hesitant to pick one up unless it runs Linux perfectly now out of the box with most distros. I have seriously contemplated picking up an X220 or some other old ThinkPad even though the hardware would technically be a massive downgrade.
• laangregor 5y ago
  Do you also have a comparison to macbooks?
• consp 5y ago
  I've done the same only with a T440p. Upgraded everything (cpu to 4 core to 47w model, max ram, CD replaced for SATA bay, screen to 1080p, touchpad to T450 version), even updated the bios to a modified version so I could set my own power curve parameters. Works great most of the time though the screen I got has deteriorated and needs replacement. I'm going to replace the fan as well as the bearing is giving out but it's not high speed on most of the time anyway. Had a T430 before that with the same upgrades but that motherboard died.
• DocTomoe 5y ago
  I'm using an old T520 as my main machine for the similar reasons - it's a rock solid machine. Yes, I gave it more memory at one point, and I replaced the HDD with an SSD. No, nothing new comes close. I only ever regret the decision when I am travelling through airports, when I see people effortlessly slide out their thin, light laptops while I heave around a machine of yesteryear, large and ominous-looking (I swear, the screening agent scrutinises the Thinkpad longer than he does look at your MBP), and heavy.
• zokier 5y ago
  For Thinkpads, T450 (from 2015) probably hits the sweet spot as a daily driver. Few important notes: * Haswell got most of the major ISA extensions like e.g. AVX2 * T440 did not have buttons for Trackpoint, making it pretty awful * 802.11ac 5GHz wifi and USB 3 are nice to have
• Markoff 5y ago
  It's funny to read this on Thinkpad T520, only thing I upgraded is 240GB mSATA SSD disk for system and i had there already 8GB RAM with empty slot to upgrade (stil no issues, so not rushing to uprgade), keeping 320GB HDD for media and backup, thinking whether to buy external harddrive or Ultrabay adapter and install third hard drive since I don't use DVDRW at all anyway. There is no problem with speed, I chose 520 because year later they already fucked up keyboards, not that it would matter now when I started to use later external keyboard, mouse and 32" display. Btw. I don't understand his issue with HDMI, I have connected display directly through DP cable. Instead of tablet I'd consider for wife something like X230/240.
• bondant 5y ago
  I'm still using my W510 from 2010 every day. Since most of my work is done on remote computer I don't need much power anyway. I have only updated the old hard drive with a good SSD. I also have plenty of ports (VGA, DP, RJ45, 3 USB), and the laptop is very sturdy I let it fall many times by mistakes and even through there are some cracks in the case it is still perfectly usable. Although it's not perfect, the laptop is heavy (about 3kg) and thick (about 3cm). But when I look at possible modern alternative it seems there aren't many which offer multiple ports and easy to do maintenance in a somewhat slim and lightweight case. The closest I've seen is the Fujitsu Lifebook U741X series (if someone has used it with Linux please share your experience). I'm also aware of the Framework laptop but it's bleeding edge so I better wait and see how it turns out to be repairable and robust.
• graycat 5y ago
  A laptop for software development or ANY serious work? No thanks. Instead I want a better keyboard, video display, and processor and want room for several disk drives, provision for more peripheral devices, etc. And I'm currently rushing back to the last update of Windows 7 Professional, a copy of Office 2016 (the 2013 version is fine except for Outlook that needs an update for a change in SMTP email standards), and an old version of Firefox. For Firefox, I have been using it to view my 6000+ HTML files of software documentation via a simple macro in the editor KEDIT, but now each time I want Firefox to display such a file I get an absurd delay and three popup windows, one to decline an update, one asking me to make Firefox my default Web browser, and one to announce that there is an update to Firefox. So, I'm just trying desperately to do MY work, and just from a simple attempt to use Firefox I get jabbed in the ribs about updates twice. I've specified both to Firefox and Windows some hundreds of times, maybe thousands, dozens in the last week, that Firefox IS my default Web browser. Somehow Windows and/or Firefox interact in some way to refuse to accept that Firefox is my default Web browser. For an update to Firefox, I've declined that now likely over 10,000 times, maybe 20,000 times, including a few hundred in the last two weeks. It appears that Firefox does have old versions available. They worked MUCH better than the recent version I've tried to use, and the old versions didn't keep pestering me, interrupting my work, stopping, refusing to work, until I click NO to some pop-ups about updates. In the old days, when a horse or mule suddenly refused to move, it got whipped. Just now I've had to stop all my work to respond to these problems of Windows and Firefox that have recently and for no good reason sabotaged my work. I've also been having similar problems with Adobe's Acrobat PDF reader. E.g., somehow the location of Acrobat was changed from C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat DC\Acrobat\Acrobat.exe to C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Acrobat Reader DC\Reader\AcroRd32.exe So, how that change was done, I don't know. To me, that sounds like a huge problem in computer security -- no such change should be possible. The change broke my KEDIT macro for starting Acrobat to read a line in KEDIT that has the tree name of a PDF file I want to read. Somehow, a bit amazing, the change was also made to my desktop icon for starting Acrobat -- the situation of LNK files for desktop icons now seems to be a complicated subject. With rare exceptions, I deeply, profoundly, bitterly hate and despise any and all updates to software that is working FINE. So, back to Windows 7 Professional and some old version of Firefox. Then find how to get Adobe Acrobat OUT of the Windows auto-start list and try HARD to get an old, stable version of Acrobat that does NOT try to do updates. These updates are nothing less than massive external attacks and sabotage of my work that force me into a version of mud wrestling that takes a huge fraction of my time. No, no, no, no, absolutely no, essentially always, I want NO updates or new versions. I want, close to screaming in frustration, to do MY work and avoid the system management disasters and sabotage of my work of absurd updates. Circumstances, long story, pushed me into a laptop instead of my desktop I plugged together around an AMD FX-8350 processor. By the way, that processor has a cooling fan but it is quiet, can't hear it. My three favorite pieces of software are Rexx, KEDIT, and TeX, and all are essentially perfect and none are subject to updates for at least some decades. These are three great tools, and I have great success and no problems with them. If my collection of hand tools worked this way, somehow I would discover that all my English dimension socket wrenches had been converted to metric. Then I would discover that my reversible electric drill had adopted a default of rotating counter clockwise and would not rotate clockwise without my pushing two buttons and holding them for three seconds each, for each use of the drill. And a new drill would have a video message window that frequently put up "Do you want to?" requiring that I stop my work and take out 20 seconds and push two buttons. Still worse will be a car with a pop-up window on a heads up display: To avoid a collision at 60 MPH, I try to slam on the brakes but nothing happens until I click on some icon to respond to some message "Do you want to do that? Using the brakes ..." CRASH. Wish me luck in defending myself from sabotaging updates and absurd pop-up windows.
• avidphantasm 5y ago
  I know they are the opposite of upgradable, but the new MacBook Pros solve all of the author’s other problems (assuming they don’t have to run Windows).
  • avidphantasm 5y ago
    And I should mention that I very much support repeatability and reuse. However, as a father of a young kid, I don’t have anywhere near the spare time to even contemplate doing something like this. Hence, I need my hardware to “just work” (for my use cases) with minimal annoyance. That’s what I value about the MacBook Pro M1 Pro.
• t8e56vd4ih 5y ago
  tl;dr: some people have too much time and no interesting hobbies. any Thinkpad above t430 will work just fine as well.
• hnthrowaway0315 5y ago
  My company decided to sell some of the old laptops before Christmas and I immediately jumped for the T430 and bought a couple of them. I know they are solid and can't wait to install Linux on them to be my main development machine. Well I ended up installing Windows 10 but still they are pretty solid.
• kombine 5y ago
  I started in a new job a year ago, and they got me the new Dell XPS 15. The experience has been dreadful so far, given that I've been a happy user of a Dell laptop for the past 5 years. Seems the quality consistently deteriorated.
• smoyer 5y ago
  One of the biggest reasons to keep an older laptop running is that they're likely to still support the S3 sleep state. I had a 2016 XPS15 which had good sleep characteristics, upgraded to a top-of-the-line 2020 XPS15 and it just sucks (battery) because it will only use S1 sleep.
• thrower123 5y ago
  The most salient thing about this whole episode is that the author was even able to upgrade anything on the laptop. I would happily take a little bit chunkier case like we used to have if that meant that I could swap out parts without having to use a soldering iron.
  • 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
    The "unsexy" business or workstation laptops from basically every large computer manufacturer allows this.
• mad182 5y ago
  I'm using X220 from 2011, it has i7, 8GB RAM and SSD, running Debian Linux. I don't even feel the need to upgrade. It's in ideal condition, I love the keyboard and form factor, and for my daily tasks mostly involving terminal, text editor and web browser if feels snappier than many modern machines I have worked with. I bought a new Dell laptop for my wife a year ago, and while the CPU and GPU are obviously way more capable for tasks like running games or encoding video, overall it just feels slower. It takes longer to boot, launch programs, even just switching between windows has some small delay. It probably would be quicker if I installed the same OS, but still - I feel better user experience from a decade old ThinkPad than new $1000+ machine out of box.
  • mhb 5y ago
    I'm also using an X220. I bought an X1 as a potential replacement but the trackpoint is unusable and the keyboard is a big step down. The X220 battery only lasts about 15 minutes though, so I need to keep it plugged in. I'd like to find a replacement battery but am not enthusiastic about prying the housing apart to install new cells or buying a knockoff from a faraway land which might start a fire.
    • orang2tang 5y ago
      The easiest way to tell the difference between a real and fake is by the white "recycle" sticker https://preview.redd.it/83f0fqegasa11.jpg?width=1263&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=91feacbef386aae69ad3ffc763bb59da5845e38b https://preview.redd.it/83f0fqegasa11.jpg?width=1263&format=... fake batteries have a poorly printed, "fat" looking battery on the recycle sticker and the real ones have a slender properly printed one. For context in the image the bottom one is fake.
      • mhb 5y ago
        Thanks, but the problem is that either it has the original cells inside and those will have the same issues as my current ones or it has new (possibly unmatched?) cells of unknown provenance.
      • 5y ago
• Demcox 5y ago
  Being a frequent on /r/thinkpads I was delighted to see a fellow ThinkPad enthusiast! Can't remember how many TP's I've had over the years but I'll attest to the older models being solid laptops. The newer ones, however, are disappointing. My last good ThinkPad was a T470s with an i5, 8GB, 256GB (UNIX/Windows). After several years of (ab)use, I wanted to splurge on a X1 Gen3 and the specs were more than enough for my needs with an i7 (hexa-core), 16GB, 512 GB, 1050TI, 1080p 400nits display. However, when I got it and started to use it hardware issues stared to pile up. I went back to my trusty T470s and sold the X1. Now I have an MBP M1 Pro and it's great.
• somesortofsystm 5y ago
  I have, over a few decades now, treated my computers like an artist would treat their paper notebook, and have therefore every laptop/portable in my personal collection as reference. Well, almost, I was lucky to have had a GRIDpad back in the day, and I still haven't got around to finding a Dauphin DTR-1, but .. yeah .. the point is, my Thinkpads are still freakishly reliable, great computers, upon which to hack. Another thing, more 'personal' computing experience .. Prior to his 'upgrade' to a gaming laptop, I had the eldest of my kids on an ol' Thinkpad or two, Linux of course, and not only did they gain much great understanding of things before encountering the consumer zone, their siblings act as force understanding multipliers. I am often much amused at their insight into why their friends Windows bollocks needs to be blown away &etc. .. although they do somehow seem to have managed to maintain their own Windows (gaming) systems well. They at least knew what Linux was before that became a thing in their lives. I attribute that fact to the Thinkpad being really great to hack on, and solid enough to give to an 8 year old and expect to have it sort of still work for a while, and in our case, a few early hacker minds were well serviced by its dependability ...
• XorNot 5y ago
  These days I just wish we'd go back to the days of easily removable keyboards, and several keyboard options for each model. I'd like a 15" laptop without a weird offset numeric keypad I never use, and the old style short travel keys you used to get rather then these rubber things with no surface texture - like you would've found on an old gateway laptop. Somewhere along the way, everyone trying to emulate Apple has just ruined things.
• s_sousa3 5y ago
  I mourn the loss of my W541 every day. Survived a series of absurdly intense physical traumas that would have obliterated a lesser machine, until she was unjustly stolen from me by the corrupt federales of Quintana Roo. But that's another story.
• rmm 5y ago
  My circa 2011 x220 thinkpad is the greatest most indestructible machine ever. It survived 10000kms of travelling on airplanes, the Indonesian jungles, underground gold mines and to this day runs like a champ. Sure a couple keys are missing, a few superficial cracks but I will never be able to throw this guy away. So man memories
  • qzw 5y ago
    I'm sure you're aware, but in case other aren't, individual Lenovo keycaps can be easily bought online.
• Aldo_MX 5y ago
  I updated my laptop this year and I picked the XPG Xenia 14, it ticked many boxes and I honestly loved it: 1. Easy to unscrew and upgrade (I bumped the RAM to 64Gb) 2. Has 2 M.2 slots (I replaced the stock SSD with 1Tb PCIE 4.0 for the OS and apps and added a 2Tb PCIE 3.0 for media and data) 3. It has a thunderbolt port, so it supports an eGPU 4. It is incredibly thin and light 5. It has a decent collection of ports
• bubblethink 5y ago
  For anyone who wants the most powerful laptop from this generation, T530/W530 can be equipped with i7-3940XM and has a good wide gamut FHD display. igpu models are recommended for battery life and linux. They are also supported well by coreboot, and you'll be able to run just about any OS on them. A slightly newer T440p is also a decent choice.
  • _shantaram 5y ago
    Don't forget that they're the last gen compatible with the classic keyboard.
• harha 5y ago
  Laptops in the early 2010s kind of reached a level of being adequate enough for most use-cases that it's hard to really justify an upgrade. I feel, as I write this on my late 2013 MacBook Pro, that it's powerful enough for most normal activities, read, browse, video calls, work on not too large data sets, etc. Anything that needs to run longer than I keep the laptop open can run on a different device, many programs are now web apps. The screen has a high resolution and the keyboard is good, if only battery and RAM replacements were easier it would be as good as new. This is different to for instance my older laptop from 2008 or that before from 2004 - horrible screens, battery life, no fast wifi or USB. But also compared to newer laptops, mine seems to get exactly the right balance between being robust and lightweight.
  • 300bps 5y ago
    To me VDI is the way to go. I want my development machine to be in the cloud and always running. I want a lightweight notebook that only takes into consideration screen, keyboard and battery that I can connect to my virtual desktop from anywhere. I want a dedicated desk at home with a $40 PCoIP thin client purchased used on EBay hooked up to my multiple monitors that connects to the same virtual desktop. With this you can truly work from anywhere even if your notebook is stolen or dies. With AWS Workspaces you can be as redundant as you want, you can create a daily snapshot of your Workspace if you want and launch it in any region if your primary region goes down.
    • gruez 5y ago
      How do you deal with the noticeable latency? It's pretty annoying even on LAN with RDP. I imagine it'll be worse on the cloud.
      • 300bps 5y ago
        I don’t notice any. I also don’t use RDP - for Amazon Workspaces I use their app that utilizes the PCoIP protocol. Other than that my last job was working at one of the largest banks in the United States. We were 100% virtual desktop since 2014. My current employer just switched to about 95% virtual desktop. Nobody ever complains about latency. I think it’s a given that literally everyone will switch to this method at some point - there are too many positives.
• imiric 5y ago
  The T430 was the machine that hooked me on to ThinkPads almost 20 years ago. Having tried many newer models since then, including the X1 Extreme I use for work nowadays, I agree that they just don't make them as they used to. Ever since the Lenovo acquisition in particular, quality has gone down substantially, to the point where they don't feel special at all, and are on par with other Chinese mass produced brands. For the exorbitant prices it still retails for, you'd think that coil whine wouldn't be an issue, and that TrackPoint drift would be fixed after all these years.
  • _shantaram 5y ago
    > you'd think that coil whine wouldn't be an issue, and that TrackPoint drift would be fixed after all these years. To be fair, trackpoint drift (atleast as I understand it) is a byproduct of the technology, ie the trackpoint driver constantly recalibrating itself. I agree with you that the quality has gone down drastically though - I miss my X220t still after upgrading to a T480 last year. I've had my keyboard replaced twice under warranty and the third one is exhibiting the same issues now that the other two did (backspace key keeps popping out).
    • imiric 5y ago
      > To be fair, trackpoint drift (atleast as I understand it) is a byproduct of the technology, ie the trackpoint driver constantly recalibrating itself. Possibly. It would be interesting to know if other implementations (some HP laptops, UHK, etc.) have the same issue. I haven't used it on any other hardware besides the USB ThinkPad keyboard, but it's disappointing that little to no investment was done in R&D to perfect the technology over the years and avoid this very common issue. Unsurprising though given the overall drop in quality since Lenovo took over.
  • imiric 5y ago
    > The T430 was the machine that hooked me on to ThinkPads almost 20 years ago. Ah, I misremembered... It was actually the T42. The T430 was still a pretty good machine.
• throwaway984393 5y ago
  It also seems that Linux hardware support gets worse over time. I upgraded an old laptop to a newer distro, and the CPU fan was constantly blowing, cpu scaling stopped working, video became buggier, Bluetooth would randomly stop working with A2DP, hibernation stopped working. It took nearly a year for me to figure out each of the issues, because this is Linux; we don't "help users" or "test hardware", that would make us soft and weak!
• post_break 5y ago
  I've got an X230 still I need to offload. 16GB of ram, IPS panel, 9 cell battery. Would anyone be interested? Not sure if this is against the rules. Located in Texas.
  • ganjatech 5y ago
    Would absolutely love to take that off your hands, sounds just like one I never should have let get away a few years back. I'm in East Coast USA and email address in my profile. Thanks!
• brynjolf 5y ago
  Anyone have a recommendation for a new laptop with a H processor? I want Thunderbolt and 8 cores. I'm thinking about HP Zbook G8
• ericls 5y ago
  Old thinkpads are like framework laptops
• papito 5y ago
  I upgraded my 2008 HP with an SSD and max amount of memory. That thing was ahead of its time - a Macbook-style touch strip where you can control volume and other things (albeit much less fancy), and fingerprint login. It's a beautiful machine, but unfortunately your biggest bottleneck is the CPU. The modern Internet is ridiculously inefficient, and the laptop struggles to do even casual browsing. And video service streaming also maxes the poor guy out. Overall, it was a satisfying experience to resurrect it. I call it Lazarus.
• herodoturtle 5y ago
  There are exactly 220 comments on here as I write this one. On a post about ThinkPads, this makes me happy.
  • ryzvonusef 5y ago
    Self Selecting though; it would be surprising if nerdy sites like HN "didn't" have love for the nerdy Thinkpads
    • herodoturtle 5y ago
      I suspect you missed my point (if you didn’t, I apologise). I was not merely pointing out the volume of comments. Instead I was embracing the joyful timing coincidence of 220 comments, in reference to one of the most iconic ThinkPads ever made - the x220.
      • ryzvonusef 5y ago
        Ah yes, I missed that, sorry Also, my 230 is better ;p
• lmilcin 5y ago
  Mine T440s survived being soaked twice. Once with hot latte, once with mineral water. Both times it was completely soaked. It has internal battery which means it is not enough to power it down, you actually have to go to BIOS to turn the battery off. But when I spilled latte the keyboard stopped working and I was unable to power it down. I had to turn it around to open it up and in the process the sweet latte reached every single part of the motherboard. The second time, I had the laptop in my bag. I put the bag on my lap on a bus stop and after some time I felt water on my legs. I yanked the laptop and from inside water started poring. I think there was at least 0.2-0.3L of water in it. As I just moved I had no tools on my hand. I had to call my boss and tell him I need to take care of my laptop. I then drove to a shopping center to buy IPA, demineralized water and tools. Water got absolutely everywhere. It was between individual leaves of LCD panel. I had to disassemble the laptop into its constituent parts including the display. In both cases I have thoroughly washed the laptop (actually submerging it), first in water and then in IPA. The laptop is still fine and other than a little bit of discoloration of the LCD panel and a small bit of hair from my beard within the panel which I missed when assembling it, you wouldn't say anything bad happened to it.
• userbinator 5y ago
  The Intel CPU-s had throttling issues that made them unusable for basic things like calls over Google Meet as they would throttle to 400 MHz. That seems to be a common theme with the newer laptops. Look up "Intel DPTF" and power limits. They are severely throttled by firmware/drivers, long before they actually hit their (thermal) limits. There are various tweaks to unlock the full potential of the CPU, the easiest of which is to disable all the manufacturer crapware completely.
  • gocartStatue 5y ago
    We hit the 400Mhz problem as well, on corporate high-end 14" Dells. Disabling thermald did not help much, as the laptop almost melted. But we discovered a "magic" spell involving rmmod/modprobe. It sparked a kind of a custom: - guys, my laptop is throttling hard (...) - here, run this untrusted code snippet as root - yaay, it worked!
    • userbinator 5y ago
      Disabling thermald did not help much, as the laptop almost melted. They'll throttle and hard-shutdown long before permanent damage occurs. Recent laptop CPUs have maximum temperatures of ~100C and are perfectly fine to stay at that temperature 24/7.
• thecrumb 5y ago
  Still use my T420. No upgrades - just running a lightweight Linux distro. And that keyboard is sublime.
  • kellengreen 5y ago
    Agreed, that T420 keyboard is simply perfection.
• gsliepen 5y ago
  My experience with laptops is that the most usable ones have a low TDP CPU with integrated graphics. This avoids overheating as much as possible, which means you get full CPU power for much longer, as well as having a longer battery life. To make sure it doesn't feel sluggish, get one with a lot of RAM and (NVMe) SSDs. I dislike the lack of ports nowadays, but USB-C makes up for it. You can get USB-C dongles that provide Ethernet, HDMI/DisplayPort, some more USB ports and USB-PD passthrough all at the same time, so they replace a complete docking station, but they still fit in your hand. That and the fact that I can use the same charger or powerbank for the laptop, phone and the latest Raspberry Pies is great.
  • nilpunning 5y ago
    Good points. Recent high end laptops suffer from terrible heat throttling. Recently I've resorted to buying a cheap old server to do most my work on. The old machine is significantly faster than my company issued 2019 Macbook Pro due to having great big fans and heat sinks, despite being 1/6 the price. Next laptop I purchase will have a lower TDP CPU like you mention and basically just be a terminal to the server.
  • tryptophan 5y ago
    About the heat-> I agree so much. I found that disabling turbo boost caused an imperceptible drop in performance, but a very noticeable decrease in heat and fan usage. I also used to undervolt the CPU after doing this. Shame that intel blocked this ability on 11th gen+ chips.
• sealthedeal 5y ago
  hahahaha when I saw that picture I immediately realized that this was just that a project but not real world use. Side note, I do love how much flexibility laptops that are not Mac have. Ive been using System76 laptops/desktops for a while, and I LOVE them and the options and upgrades you can make (I do not work for System) lol.
• jjkmk 5y ago
  Primary issue I have with Lenovo systems is the swap of the FN key and the Ctrl key. I know it can be changed in BIOS, I just hate the idea of breaking the standardized layout.
• pcdoodle 5y ago
  Dell Latitude and Precisions from this era are also an excellent choice, paired with a docking station @ home with dual monitors, you're golden.
• ho_schi 5y ago
  Using here an X220. I replaced the HDD by an SDD and extended the RAM - it is still working. Currently I'm looking for a new small "44" battery (which fits completely into the body) but the replacement I received has a malfunction. I've still a 44+ which provides a longer runtime but also weights more. Plus the excellent hardware-maintenance manual! Of course always running with Linux. The new models are more sturdy (good) and provide a lot more CPU and GPU-Power (AMD) but the RAM is soldered and the battery not swap-able. We need laws which enforce sustainable devices wich swap-able disks, main-memory, batteries and long time spare part supply including maintenance manuals. It shall be EXPENSIVE and UNATTRACTIVE for both vendors and buyers to purchase devices which doesn't offer this. How? Put well understandable "traffic lights" on every device by category {software replaceable, spare parts, maintenance manual, batteries}. Every single red light needs to increase the price by 30%[1]. I don't call for prohibition! Sometimes somebody need something extra flat and soldered and whatever reason - but even how uninformed you are - you must be aware of it how you harm yourself and anyone else. Apple MacBook: Software not replaceable + 30% Batteries glued and not purchasable from third parties + 30% Maintenance manual not published + 30% This adds 90% extra tax upon price. Lenovo ThinkPad: Batteries screwed or glued, even require buying a "guarantee" for replacement service + 30% Main-Memory soldered + 30 This adds 60% extra tax upon price Smartwatch which is glued? Guess what! And I'm not saying adding another 30% extra for the not replaceable software because it allow it to be an embedded appliance. In case of Smartphones this will be another 30%. I hope both customers and vendors will change their behavior quickly. If not we have a lot money to spend for health, schools and social support. What I don't want and not require is that you use your laptop for ten years. That unfair and not necessary but something possible and even normal. And if you're a developer or gamer, sell the old one and buy a new one. As long the devices can be used a long time it is good. [1] I've chosen a high value to ensure an effect, especially - but not limited - to the high end market.
• bigpeopleareold 5y ago
  My T430s: would be nice if I can pull out better battery life (have two new ones) and has some occasional issues with the wiring for the network hardware kill switch. It's perceptibly slower on some pages, but only slightly (never bothered to figure out if it was the old WiFi or the CPU, an i7 for the time). It has some superficial cracks on it. It would also be nice to have USB-C and all that new stuff. But: with a screen upgrade (1080p with the ASIC card) and the best laptop keyboard I ever used and spare parts online galore and the potential at least to easily swap the BIOS and upgrade further, and perfectly fine and performant for the software development I do, it's close to perfect. Maybe a T430/quad-core would be nicer, but I'd rather just own my work computer (T470p, which is also close to perfect as well, but in other ways.) So, it is rather funny to confirm again what some others might be thinking. The hardware is old and will have longer-term support issues, but for now and for a long time, I am glad not to think about having to get a new laptop for any use.
• bachmeier 5y ago
  My favorite laptop is an Acer I bought new in early 2009 for maybe $400. The only hardware change I made was to upgrade the RAM from 2 GB to max it out at 4 GB. There are a couple of advantages. First, it's a joy to type on something with a good keyboard. Part of it is that older laptops have more bulk to them, and that makes for a better typing experience for me. Second, modern displays are the wrong shape. It's hard to find a nearly-square screen these days. Performance is not an issue. It's the most responsive computer I own. I'm running AntiX, a distro that shows how to do lightweight right. Having said all of the above, one thing limits my usage. It has a 32-bit CPU. Among other things, that means no Electron apps, and one in particular is critical to my workflow.
• Shorel 5y ago
  > I’d like to thank Intel here for making this possible. The CPU innovation stagnation between 2012-2017 has resulted in 4 cores still being an acceptable low-end CPU in early 2022. Without this, my laptop would likely be obsolete by now. Hahaha, this last sentence seals the overall tone of the article.
  • MR4D 5y ago
    This. Last January I converted my old (2012) quad-core Intel desktop and gave it to my son for gaming. The only thing I had to do was add a 1-TB SSD and put in an RTX-3060 Ti, and it runs every game (Fortnite, CoD, etc) at 100+ FPS without any issues. I'm still amazed that a simple GPU change and the machine keeps up with his friends brand-new AMD box (not sure what chip, just that it was new in 2021). When the 12th generation intel chips came out last month, it was the first time I felt good about the future for chips. (Yes, I know AMD has been kicking their butt, but that's been in core count and power, which aren't as relevant for my son's gaming.)
    • unethical_ban 5y ago
      What other metrics are there for a processor in gaming, if not (compute) power per core, as well as core count? Sure, a gaming computer doesn't need 8 cores as much as an encoder, but AMD's single core performance is right up there with Intel, for much less money. Disclaimer: AMD fanboy and stockholder
      • MR4D 5y ago
        I was using power to mean electricity, not compute power. Thanks for noticing that ambiguity. As for your comment about core usage in games, I'm still surprised how few cores it takes, even for modern games. Not my knowledge area at all, so all of that part of gaming and computing architecture is a bit opaque to me.
    • terminalcommand 5y ago
      Was it a Xeon processor :)?
• ziotom78 5y ago
  I did something similar by switching back to my old Lenovo after a poor experience with a HP computer. I tell here my story for those interested in cases like the one described in the article. Three years ago, I was feeling that my Lenovo Thinkpad Edge 540 (2014) was a bit outdated, and since I just won a grant and had some money for this, I looked for a new laptop. At the time, my employer encouraged all the staff to buy laptops from HP; the discount was not significant, but for those that accepted to follow that route, the amount of bureaucracy was significantly less (I work in a public university in Italy, and the bureaucracy for even the simplest tasks can be daunting!). The model I chose was a HP ProBook G450, and I bought an extended warranty too. After less than one year, one of the small plastic clips holding each key in place on the keyboard got loose, and after having put it again in place a few times, after a couple of weeks broke. I contacted the assistance, asking for a replacement of the pin. Well, they told me that my extended warranty did not cover «external peripherals» like the keyboard (wtf, is the keyboard in a laptop an external perhiperal?!). The person at the phone was clearly embarassed in telling me that HP's policy prevented them from sending these paper clips by email, and he instead told me that the only solution was to substitute the whole keyboard for ~340€. Obviously I refused. I started looking for replacement pins on eBay (which were sold for <1€ each), but in the meantime another key pin broke, followed by another one, and another one… In a few months, I had a dozen of keys with broken pins! (Before suggesting that I should type with less force, let me say that I have a soft touch, and that no other laptop I owned had this kind of problem.) I decided to buy a replacement keyboard on eBay, after I quickly checked on YouTube that there were videos showing how to make the replacement step by step. Once I got the keyboard by email, I started tearing apart the laptop as described in these videos, but at the end I found that some glue was keeping the keyboard attached to the frame, and that I should have used some solvent to remove it and then glue it again. (It would have been better for me to view the video in its entirety before ordering the replacement!) I was scared by the idea of doing this kind of work, as I never did something similar before, so I decided that I would have instead removed the pins from the new keyboard and used them in the laptop. I put together every piece of the laptop again, but I probably broke some wire or misplaced some component, because once assembled the computer refused to start! Out of frustration, instead of debugging the problem, I took my old Lenovo Thinkpad out of the shelf and upgraded its OS, putting the two-year-old HP back in a drawer. It has been my workhorse again since six months, and despite not being as performant as the other one, at least it works! In particular, now I am really appreciating the sturdy keyboard, which is still working fine after 8 years. To think that I disliked it when I typed on it for the first time!
• kerneloftruth 5y ago
  This article makes me more glad than ever that I saved all my old Stinkpads (a name I use cynically, yet affectionately). They're the only brand of laptop I've used since when they were made by IBM. I have 8 or so now. None of them quit working -- all replaced just because I wanted a newer model. Reliability and Linux readiness has never really been an issue (except the normal Nvidia driver issues). These, along with a stash of IBM M-101 keyboards keeps my ergonomics consistent since the 90s.
• giantg2 5y ago
  My laptop is a 32 bit dual core from 2008ish. Just needed a new battery and an upgrade from hdd to ssd. Works pretty well for most stuff.
• marcodiego 5y ago
  My laptop is from 2012 too. It has got an i5 processor with 2 HT cores, so the OS sees 4 cores. I upgraded its RAM to 8GB and replaced the HD by a 1TB SSD. Good enough for what I do. I tried a recent machine with a modern i5 and the same amount of RAM and a 1TB SSD. The owner asked me to update the OS to windows 11. It didn't seemed faster than my laptop with ubuntu 20.04. A 10 year old laptop may be still good with enough RAM and a SSD, but I doubt recent versions of windows will run well on such machines.
  • icey 5y ago
    Linux works amazingly well on these machines, fwiw. I have a modded x230 that performs surprisingly well with Arch. Ubuntu worked great on it as well. So many Linux users use Thinkpads that the chipsets are very well supported.
• lifefeed 5y ago
  I've had great experiences with Apple products lasting far longer than they should. I won a first gen iPad when it first came out, and six years later I would use it as an umbrella to run down the block to the coffee shop, and it would still work when I got there. My phone is a five year old iPhone SE, I've replaced the battery once and the screen once, and it's running great.
• visiblink 5y ago
  I haven't seen the ThinkPad L440 mentioned here. I bought one a few years ago because it has the same benefits as a T440p but the value hasn't been inflated. It's part of that last generation where the CPU is user replaceable. The screen can be upgraded to an IPS if you can find a good replacement. It's supposedly a lesser build quality, but the plastics seem great and mine's still going after my wife stepped on it. I have a bad habit of leaving it on the floor by my chair.
• bluedino 5y ago
  > Replace the display with a compatible 1600x900 panel that has better image quality. The current screen is awful The TN displays from those days are so bad. Why Lenovo didn't at least have an IPS option for their machines (other than the tablets, which they did), is a mystery to me. The T430S was the straw that broke the camel's back for me. Atrocious. I finally stuck to MacBook Air/Pro at that point. https://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Lenovo-ThinkPad-T430s-Notebook.82261.0.html#1006263 https://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Lenovo-ThinkPad-T430s-N... In the last couple years, they started putting decent 1080 screens in (sometimes the brightness is lacking, but my T480 is not bad at all), and they have a fantastic 1440p screen in some models.
• localhost 5y ago
  There's a post[1] from 2019 about a group in Shenzen who update classic Thinkpads to modern specs. It's also been mentioned here a bunch of times [2-4]. I got an email from the group just a couple of weeks ago and they're building another batch. It's a bit sketchy with the Western Union funds transfer but I'm seriously considering it. I love the build quality of the x220s that I still have here, but would love to have better internals. [1] https://geoff.greer.fm/2019/03/04/thinkpad-x210/ https://geoff.greer.fm/2019/03/04/thinkpad-x210/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19246406 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19246406 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19246406 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19246406 [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19413436 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19413436
• 627467 5y ago
  I've got a T430 as my personal laptop (although I still use the work one more than I should) 2-3 years ago specifically because of its upgradeability. Since then I found myself having the haul the laptop enough times to wish for something smaller and lighter so acquired a smaller X240. I don't plan to move away from (these) ThinkPads until the arm-based improvements make it compelling enough. Hopefully someone will make a arm-based laptop that is as modules/thinkerable as ThinkPads.
• Paianni 5y ago
  I 'retired' a T510 in 2017 that's slightly deficient by modern standards, Google Maps in particular is not much fun to use on it. I think their durability is overrated; a clip broke on the bundled battery and it wouldn't stay attached after that, and some of the plastic strips around the air vent broke off from being caught on something while in transit. I'm not a huge fan of the red nipple in the keyboard but it was very comfortable aside from that. Nowadays a tower suits me better.
• turkeytail 5y ago
  I am also currently using a ThinkPad from around 2015 running Fedora. Fedora and Linux support in general has increased so much in the past few years. Every function you would expect works out of the box, including Bluetooth, brightness, volume and all of the keys associated with that are functioning.
• spaceisballer 5y ago
  X220 checking in. All I’ve done is a new battery, SSD and upgraded to 16gb ram. My son plays Minecraft and Roblox on it all the time and works great. Keep considering upgrading it but it works great for what’s it’s being used for.
• internetuser103 5y ago
  I still use a T430 in my kitchen, great laptop.
• dangus 5y ago
  The author should be made aware that the 11th-gen Intel products are a no-buy, and should be shopping for 12th gen models that are around the corner, which are quite a leap forward and similar to the Apple M1 in their level of impressiveness. I'd say overall this article is a curmudgeon-ish view of modern laptops. The author tried two brands of laptops, from two manufacturers who are not even close at the top of the market in terms of level of innovation. Dell and Lenovo are two brands that businesses automatically purchase like zombies, even though they often represent some of the worst choices available. There are some truly amazing pieces of tech out there that will stomp all over a 2012 ThinkPad in both performance and innovative features. Here's an example video showing off the latest upcoming models from ASUS, just from one OEM. I know these laptops are all gaming-oriented, but a lot of them are packed with some really cool and clever features and form factor innovation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdBTkgtnTsw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdBTkgtnTsw
• lowbloodsugar 5y ago
  I was looking for a linux laptop last week. Dell only showed one laptop (Precision 7760 Workstation) that they support linux on. It doesn't seem surprising that if the reviewer bought a Dell that Dell don't support linux on, then it didn't support linux when the reviewer tried either.
• miahi 5y ago
  I did almost all the same upgrades to my T430 around 2014, with small variations (BIOS reflash with hardware programmer instead of software workaround for wifi upgrade, as at that point no workarounds existed). I used it for more than 2 years, but I had to upgrade because I needed more RAM. It still lives with a friend. It was surprising how well the CPU behaved, especially since the thermal solution was not really created to handle 45W CPUs (there were no T430 laptops with quad core CPUs).
• ralphc 5y ago
  I have my own version of "Bill Gate's" quote , "640K Ought to be Enough for Anyone". An i7 with 16GB of memory ought to be enough for anyone. "Anyone" in this case is the typical office worker or home surfer. Gamers, devs with a bunch of VMs, data scientists, no, but the vast majority of people surfing and running Office? It's enough.
• ranqet 5y ago
  I had a 2011 MacBook Air that I used as a casual "couch laptop" up until a month ago. I probably could have continued using it if it wasn't for both the battery and the power supply becoming unreliable. It surprises me that with a dual core i5 and 4GB of RAM, it was more than adequate for all but the most demanding tasks.
• linsomniac 5y ago
  I've generally been in this camp, up until last month my primary personal box was a 5-6 year old Chromebook (HP Chromebook 13 G1), which with the recent ability to run Linux containers let me do almost everything in my "home" workflow. However, a month ago I got one of those new Macbooks to fill in a few voids the Chromebook and borrowing my wife's laptop couldn't. The biggest being video editing. The main incentive was back in October when I spent ~30 hours editing my kids school concert video. Playing all sorts of tricks to get the machine to be barely useful for editing, etc. That Mac hardware lets me copy the media from my phone or action cam and directly edit it. I don't have to generate optimized media, and it's lightning fast at scrubbing and rendering. Now I'm running into wanting to update my work laptop, which is only a couple years old, because I got 2 4K monitors on end-of-year sale, and the laptop can only drive them at lower resolutions. So, yes, for many use cases older laptops are just great. I felt stupid spending that money on a new laptop, for what is an infrequent use case (videos, slicing 3D files being the big ones). But, what previously, even with my desktop that died, was a painful experience, has now become a joy. That has made it worth the price. Plus, my spend on laptops over the last 7 years, personally, has been around $700. If an old laptop works for you, great! If an old laptop plus some new upgrades works for you, fantastic! But, don't forget that if spending some money can solve a pain point, it might still be a good value.
• ryzvonusef 5y ago
  I have two Thinkpad X230T 2nd Gen i5 (T stands for touchscreen, it has a swivel capacitive touchscreen and a stylus) They don't have webcams (they have space for it but these being refurbed office models they were probably sold without webcams installed. But I have a seperate 360p webcam in some drawer should the need arise. The one I'm using right now has windows 10 (no W11 support ;p), the other has chrome OS. (but only one charger sadly, original battery and charger are a pain in the butt for me to find). These are perfect for my casual needs, and If I need anything extra, I have a refurbed Thinkstation S30 with a quaint Quadro 2000 card (no prefix). (It has no w11 support either, heh) My real issue is battery (even the chrome OS one has ~2 hrs battery, I really thought the lightweight OS would help but hasn't) and inability to play x265 codec files. Backlit keyboard would have been nice but eh. But with an SSD and and 8gb ram upgrade, it's a dream to use, it's a nice compact size, the keyboard is amazing, and it has decent port selection. I don't game or edit videos or whatever, and I'm never far from a charging point (the charger is a slim tube thing, so takes barely any bulk) so I'm not sure why I would need more for quite some time, as long as nothing is physically wrong with it.
  • Stratoscope 5y ago
    At the risk of nitpicking, the T stands for Tablet, not touchscreen. The full product name is ThinkPad X230 Tablet, which is often shortened to ThinkPad X230t or ThinkPad X230T.
    • ryzvonusef 5y ago
      ah damn, mixed that up, sorry
• amatecha 5y ago
  haha, the similarities to my recent experiences are funny. I also recently have started using an X230 (same era as T430) and an X220, also running open source OSes and I used Hugo to publish my personal site, using the same theme as the article author. Today, these machines are so affordable and still offer excellent computation power and acceptable power efficiency. Not mind-blowing, but still fine. The repairability is a major plus, one of the best in a laptop I've thus far seen.
• diebeforei485 5y ago
  On the MacBook side of things, the jump from a 2012 machine to a 2020/2021 M1 machine is enormous.
• bitwize 5y ago
  My current main laptop is a T450s from 2014 or so. It's got 12 GiB of RAM, enough to run most dev tools comfortably. The slowdown in CPU speed acceleration has meant that a PC from between five and ten years ago, or even more, is not as flagrantly obsolete as it once was, and I'd rather keep life in my old machines, especially when new machines start to grow features I don't want (like Pluton).
• forgotmypw17 5y ago
  A car from 1950s and up is quite serviceable today, and I think we're getting to the same place with computers. I don't buy things on principle (freganism/volunteerism), so I'm restricted to hand-me-down computers, and I've been quite happy with this for the past 7+ years. Of course, my work is mostly text-based, but I'm quite happy with a high-end 6-year-old computer today, and before this was using an 8-year-old computer low-end computer with some obstacles. I think that as a web developer, I can promote this idea further by leaning hard into the accessibility and compatibility spectrum, really embracing "Any Browser" 100% and leaving no browser, client, user, scenario, network condition, etc. behind. And I do. All the sites I develop, as well as the framework I use for them, are guaranteed compatible with Netscape 2.0+, IE 3.0+, Opera 3.0+, and pretty much everything that's come since then, including text-mode, no-JS, and screen-readers.
• catdog 5y ago
  Those 10 year old Thinkpads are still surprisingly capable. I still didn't completely stop using my X220 (also with some HW upgrades like 16GB RAM and ac Wifi) although I bought a Thinkpad P14s Gen 2 (AMD) this year. Some remarks for running Linux on the P14s: > On AMD models, performance was less than stellar for my workloads and not a significant jump over a laptop from 2018. Might be that you need to bump up some power management settings to get full performance via e.g. [1] or [2]. There is also /sys/firmware/acpi/platform_profile but this is broken currently for T14/P14s Gen2 AMD and maybe other models [3]. > Wi-Fi/Bluetooth would not work on one of the laptops, even when I was using an up-to-date Linux distro. Likely related to the type of adapter used (not Intel). Lenovo switched to using a Realtek adapter for some models (due to chip shortage according to their Linux support team). Linux 5.16 includes the driver now, there is also a backport [2] for older kernel versions available. [1] https://github.com/FlyGoat/RyzenAdj https://github.com/FlyGoat/RyzenAdj [2] https://github.com/xsmile/ryzen-ppd https://github.com/xsmile/ryzen-ppd [3] https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=215177 https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=215177 [4] https://github.com/lwfinger/rtw89 https://github.com/lwfinger/rtw89
• spapas82 5y ago
  Recently I bought a T420 for 120 euros. I updated it to 8gb ram and 250 ssd for 100 more euros. Total cost 220 euros for a laptop that covers most of my needs as a developer. It runs Windows 10 and manjaro Linux on two partitions flawlessly! I don't think that there's a better value for money laptop anybody could buy. If somebody believers otherwise I'd really like to see what's the other options.
• JALTU 5y ago
  Reading this on my 2012 15" Retina MBP w/ 16GB and 2.3 GHz Core i7 running High Sierra. Don't know what those CPU numbers mean since everything still "just works!" ;^) Okay, actually Adobe cloud software tanked years ago, and my Tweetdeck is a bit slow to load, and my iPhone 11 Pro's photo features don't work consistently, but otherwise, I figure I can wait for the M2 MBP. p.s., Thanks goes to my employer for the 2020 MBP in case I truly need something recent, like the Touchbar. No, just kidding! ;^)
• neilv 5y ago
  I'm typing this on my daily driver, a T500 (manufactured May 2009), and it's fine for Linux development workstation after a few tweaks. The tweaks are to install SSD, max out RAM at 8 GB, swap in the second-fastest P-series CPU, and install an older and better T60 keyboard. The T500 is hopeless for anything GPU-heavy, but I have a GPU server for compute jobs. Before moving from T60 to T500, I bought and tried a few newer models, but decided the T500 was the best balance for lines of code and laptop ergonomics (sadly, the T520 was just too wide and heavy to be comfortable using in all the laptop ways). About the only compute-bound thing that's painful right now is a very small number Web sites that are doing grossly-inefficient JavaScript to secretly spy intimately on my browsing behavior, yet are not yet blocked by the uBlock Origin ruleset I maintain.
• alaq 5y ago
  > I had to drop my screen resolution to 720p This is the deal breaker for me. Upgrading my trusty x250 to a M1 MacBook Air means I can use two external monitors comfortably again.
• chj 5y ago
  If my T410 didn’t have that crappy screen I would still be using it. Felt very solid compared to latest models.
• stronglikedan 5y ago
  I'm still rocking an SL510 from 2009. It's been relegated to home server duty due to it's bulkiness, but it still runs like a champ. I like them so much, I just upgraded to an X1 Yoga Gen 6. Beast of a product line.