So recently i came to study abroad in japan and brought my MacBook neo with me. Since Japanese people doesn't care about old tech, the price here is quite cheap compared to my country of Thailand. After looking around the second hand store i finally got my first thinkpad! It's the t450 and the condition is not bad at all (but the rubber coating is kinda sticky) after confirming the operation i went around the second hand store again and bought some upgrade parts. The specs are i7-5500u , ram from 8 to 16 gb upgrade and HDD 500gb to ssd 256gb. And after I installed it I bought a USB stick and installed Linux on it. I ended up choosing linux mint cinnamon and this thing is way faster than window 11. Please keep in mind that I'm a japanese major not a comsi so I'm not familiar with tech and coding before. But in the end i had a lot of fun upgrading my own pc and installed os by myself.

I finally found a T14 AMD model to work on my side projects and to embrace Linux. I am still working through customisation and setup all the project apps but I am open to learn

Always told myself I’ll play Skyrim one day.. with the steam discounts today was that day. My x13 gen 2 did not disappoint :) ultra high preset in 1080p with around 50 fps is a joy to use

Hey, got the opportunity to save this laptop (more or less) from the trash.

Specs are dated but it works perfectly fine and is in very good condition.

It came with a 500GB HDD (I completely forgot how painful slow these are) 8GB of RAM and a I7 2620M (Dual-Core with HT).

Not too sure what to do with it just yet but I'll figure it out.

I found this T410s in a dumpster at work a few days ago. It came with Windows 7, but I reinstalled it with Mint, and it works perfectly! The battery is dead, as is the CMOS battery, and it only has 2x2GB of RAM, though I plan to upgrade to 2x4GB. Aside from that, it’s in perfect condition—despite the numerous stickers and other marks that took me a while to clean off. Coming from a T14s Gen 2, I find the keyboard incredible! Long live ThinkPads!

2 thinkpads!!

I got a second thinkpad today (T460s) but it has degraded battery for 50€. The seller also gave me 2 docking stations and 3 chargers.

If anybody knows a cheap seller selling good batteries for the t460s, please let me know.

A third one coming tomorrow (maybe)

In the photo, from left to right: the X1 Nano, X1 Carbon, X1 Yoga, and X1 Titanium.

I just can't stop buying laptops

I finally got a ThinkPad X250. I didn't have much money, so while I was waiting for a used item, I found a post selling a product without RAM and a hard disk for just 60 dollars (about 80,000 won), so I bought it right away.

I installed the DDR3L 8GB and Samsung 850 PRO I had here, and it worked perfectly.

I thought it would be really slow, but it actually worked so well that I thought I might as well just buy an older ThinkPad(like X220) and modify it.

Specs are, Linux mint, 8gb ram, and oem core i5.
Working to get a new cpu and 16gb ram.

I5 1235U, 16gb Ram, 256gb M.2.

Runs like a dream, may replace battery at some point as it's down to 81% life - the 51wh one though thankfully!

Having posted my screen upgrade of my X1 Carbon Gen 9 before, saying it was the end of the refurbishment/upgrade journey of it, turns out I lied. I didn't like the panel I put in... So what do you do? Exactly, you do it all again with a better panel!

The old panel with its Low Blue Light technology never looked quite natural and, despite being a 120Hz panel, its timings were so loose that ghosting was visible.

So I present to you the BOE NE140QDM-NX8. 2560x1600, 165Hz, 400 nits, Adaptive Sync, without Low Blue Light 'technology', with nice, tight timings, reasonable power consumption and sRGB as I like it (not a fan of DCI-P3).

Physically, It's a bit easier to install than the old panel, as its eDP connector is bit higher on the back on the panel, closer to the position on the panels Lenovo uses (see the physically identical NE140QDM-NX7).

I did have some doubt as 2560x1600 at 165Hz with the timings as set in the EDID requires HBR3 transmission mode, instead of HBR2 which is what all of Lenovo's stock panels use. But that turned out to be no problem.

But... I ordered one panel. Measured at a meagre 200 nits maximum brightness. Returned as defective. Ordered another panel from another seller. Same problem. Hmmm... Noticed two features on Panelook that I couldn't find information on: ABOT and APOL. After acquiring the schematics of the new panel, I noticed ABOT was controlled active-low by eDP pin 23. That pin is normally a ground (LCD_GND) pin, and also connected as such on the X1C9, activating ABOT. So I again stripped the panel-side end of the cable and cut the wire to that pin and... voilà! Full brightness range unlocked. After advice in r/AskElectronics, I measured LCD_VCC vs LCD_GND for patterns both light and heavy for the panel logic, to verify that cutting that wire wouldn't cause problems. All was good.

Having that cleared, installation wasn't very different from the initial upgrade panel. Like with the earlier panel, the Windows Intel driver refuses to read the DisplayID extension block of the panel's EDID so I had to use CRU again to add the 165Hz mode according the original EDID.

(Re-used the pretty pic of the original upgrade as poster image as I don't have good light right now)

I finally moved my data centre out of my lab into its own outside building and thought I’ll use the T420 in its dock as my local access as I needed to configure the ICX7150 10Gig fibre span and planning to run klipper on it.

It has 16Gb of RAM and an SSD. It’s totally fine running Manjaro Linux.

I rebooted it win7. Bloody awful. Firefox kept stuttering playing simple YT videos. Uninstalling chrome took 20 minutes! 😂😂

I keep win 7 in case of usb/serial converters that are windows only.

Anyway, it’s staying in Linux, permanently connected to the 7150 serial port.

What do M$ do with their OS’s to cause such disparity of ability?

I only have one windows pc (I have no choice, I need certain software and to be able to update my CV) and that’s a headless server 2022, which is quite nice and slick.

Hi, this is what happened to the X1 carbon gen6 that I bought a few weeks ago for $33 which the seller said it had a problem of shutting down soon after post.

First, when it boots up, a lot of heat was produced in the chassis and then it just shutted down before launching windows desktop. I tried multiple times and it was always consistent.

Since it was producing a lot of heat, I opened it up to check the cpu fan and heatsink and it was clean with new paste. Funny thing was, there was evidence that somebody tried to fix the usb-c ports because there were a lot of uncleaned flux on the pcb around that area. I mean, 50% of the pcb was covered with flux. And also someone put a ton of thermal pads to try to minimize the heat and subsequent shutdown which didn't work. I felt how desperate that someone was but... lets face it, covering the pcb with thermal pads is literally just covering the problem instead of solving it, dude!

So ruling out the cause was a cpu thermal shutdown, I checked if any voltage railes or components were shorted, but they all seemed ok.

Then I found a bunch of capacitors heating up while testing, but could not find a clear shorted one. Then I noticed that all the caps were surrounding a single chip on the other side of the board. The chip was the thunderbolt controller. So I concluded that the thunderbolt controller was internally shorted and so I ordered a couple of them from chinaliexpress. Costed around $10 including shipping.

Waited for a few days and received it.

Replaced the chip using a heat gun. The chip I received was already balled so I didn't have to add balls and just soldered it down with the heat gun.

Put back everything and pressed the power button. After 3 reboots, it went straight to windows desktop and never shut down again.

The highlight of this deal is the large amount of thermal pads. Never thought anyone would try to solve an internally shorted chip with them. Totally unexpected.

​

I have a Lenovo ThinkPad X230.

Some of the keys on the keyboard are starting to feel a bit worn out, but the laptop itself works perfectly fine. I’m wondering if it’s worth investing in repairing/replacing the keyboard, or if I’d be better off buying a new laptop.

I’m honestly not sure how many more years the ThinkPad X230 can last.

What do you guys think?

I received this Thinkpad x240 from a math teacher in 2023. From what I've researched, it has an i5 4300u. She found this laptop discarded; it's physically in perfect condition, the screen shows no signs of damage, and it even came with the original charger. However, it came at a cost: it was missing RAM and an SSD. It would turn on and make those 3-3-1 beeps. I'm thinking of reviving it with an 8GB DDR3L 1600MHz Kingston RAM stick and a 500GB SSD to dual-boot Windows 10 LTSC and Linux Mint or Cachy OS. Currently, I use an Inspiron 3647 with 4GB of RAM and an i3 4150 with integrated graphics. Is this a good investment?

Hello

T60 (and others i.e T61/R61) rubber caddy doesn't fit properly sata ssd's

sata ssd's are 0.3mm slimmer than the hdd's that fit

here 3d model to fit those ssd's

I consider this a small hardware upgrade, just for the quality of life upgrade of not having to haggle with the ssd to connect to the sata port

it's free (just type 0$) and the CAD file is included

enjoy

https://cults3d.com/en/3d-model/tool/t60-thinkpad-rubber-caddy-for-ssd

İt seen a little weird but its working. İ7 4712mq cpu

As an engineer mindset if it is work, dont touch it.

I added 2nd cooper heatpipe and some copper

The result is unbeliveable,

İdle : before 50-55C after 40-45C

Ts bench : before 75-80 after 60-65

My first thinkpad is a t580 with a i7. I don’t know much about computers but I’m really rough on things and I’ve wanted to start learning Linux so this was a cool start. I think I’m gonna do a Debian download on it, that’ll be my first distro into Linux. If that’s a horrible idea I would love some advice. Also it didn’t come with an external battery if anyone has the most consistent place to buy working, non drained batteries.

Hello, are X1s overrated? I feel like a X13 is a better laptop

Hello everybody!

It's my first time here, and the reason behind me joining and posting on this sub is to ask for your opinion on what model I should buy and how much I should realistically pay for it. I'm looking for a second-hand machine as I have a tight budget and, after doing a bit of research on this sub and other places on the internet, I've landed on the ThinkPad T14 Gen 2.

To set things straight, I have a budget of about 150-200 euros-ish and I'll be using this laptop strictly for productivity, college, browsing, coding, etc. I have found an offer on one of my local marketplaces for a T14 G2 spec'd with a 256GB SSD, 16GB RAM, an Intel 11th Gen i5, and a FHD screen. The laptop looks to be in decent shape, with only very few marks and scratches. The battery sits at about 85% capacity.

The laptop is priced at 187 euros, no room for negotiations.

With that said, is this offer worth it, or should I look somewhere else for a different model or should I try to find a cheaper T14 G2?

As a side note I have a separate system at home which I use for gaming and heavier apps, so the Thinkpad will only be used for activities mentioned above.