/tpg/ - ThinkPad General

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If you're looking for purchase advice, READ THE BUYERS GUIDE FIRST. Then post, stating budget and requirements (e.g. size and performance).
>Don't buy anything OTHER THAN IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad T, X, and W/P Series if you want the Real Business Experience™

Recommended IBM models:
X60, X61, T60, T61, 860, Transnote, PC110

Recommended freedom models:
xx00 series, IBM xx0 series
Check libreboot.org for details.

Recommended modern models:
X220 - 12", 768p, cheap and light
T420 - 14", 900p, widely avaiable, socketed CPU, Ivy Bridge installable w/ Coreboot
W520 - 15", 1080p, Desktop Replacement, 32GB RAM on quadcore models, USB 3.0

T440p, T540p, W540 - last ThinkPads to have replacable CPUs, IPS displays avaiable, chiclet

P-series - reminiscent to old build quality, top-of-the-line specs, better than most current mobile workstations, but very expensive

Why ThinkPad?
>Used machines are plentiful and cheap
>Excellent keyboards - tactile feel and quiet
>Great durability: chassis uses a magnesium rollcage for structural integrity, with high quality plastic body panels
>Utilitarian design: e.g. indicator LEDs, 7 row keyboard layout on older models
>Docking stations that easily turns your laptop into a desktop
>Easy to repair (most models), upgrade & maintain thanks to readily available service manuals for every model, spare parts easy & cheap to obtain
>The best TrackPoint, great for those who type a lot or hate swiping their fingers all over a touchpad
>Excellent GNU/Linux & *BSD support

Used ThinkPad Buyers Guide:
ktgee.net/tpg

New guides by xsauc:
dankpads.com

ThinkWiki - Info on ThinkPads & running GNU/Linux on them:
thinkwiki.org/wiki/ThinkWiki

ThinkPad service guides w/ tutorial videos:
lenovoservicetraining.com/

EPP discount for new ThinkPads:
pastebin.com/JVwVGVTW

Other urls found in this thread:

cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-7700HQ-vs-Intel-Core-i7-2860QM/m211019vsm103
twitter.com/SFWRedditImages

Could someone please tell me the difference between a Chicony and a Liteon keyboard. In your opinion, which one is the best ?

Is a thinkpad tab x1 worth it vs surface pro?

I'd like to somewhat piggyback this question. I want to know the best keyboard manufacturer for the backlit xx30 series machines for my W530, can't be bothered to check what I currently have but I don't like the feel that much. The keys have an unpleasant dampening and the trackpoint buttons are utter shit, all sticky and often clicks don't register with the expected reasonable force. I don't want to have to mash the shit to get it to register.

Can I replace the ISO keyboard on my T420 with an ANSI one?

Is the T440p portability an issue? I can get one with decent specs at a good price, but I don't really know if I will suffer with it when carrying to the university or should I just get an X series?

What would be a good workstation replacement for a current year computer? the 520 seems to be a bit old now.

What's a good thinkpad/laptop for no more than $1800?

Hello. I'm looking for instructions on long-term maintenance and repair of T61p (15" version w/ bumpgate survivor nvidia), W500, and W520 models. In particular, cleaning the thermal interfaces and fans of the heatsink assembly.

Y'all can guess what happened: after years of gainful neckbearding, each of my 15 inch Thinkpads have sucked up enough dust and such to throttle down when playing 720p x265 at 24..30 fps. Is it truly that frightening to take the whole heatsink off, re-grease its contact points, and remove the fan for cleaning? Does this help? Thermal compound turns back to dust in a few years and can be replaced, but what about the fan -- will its motor coil be permanently fucked?

t. hanks in advance

>Can I replace the ISO keyboard on my T420 with an ANSI one?

sure it can

I'm a poorfag and I bought a refurbished Lenovo T430 for $300. It has an i5 3320m with an Nvidia NVS 5400M.

Is this one good? Or should I look for another model?

p51 maybe or p71

Purely depends on your usage.

That model is probably the best all-arounder for the price, so you did good pig.

it's pretty good price, go for it

I just want a computer that can run Civ III and RO2, and apparently the graphics card is not actually that shitty so I can probably run RO2 in low at an acceptable framerate. Besides that it would be a Sup Forums shitposting machine probably running Arch or Slack (I plan to have Windows in another HDD and swap whenever I feel like playing.)

I currently have a potato with an Atom N570 so actually whatever would be an upgrade.

oh yeah you'll be perfectly fine my dude

Where are the toaster stickers?

No

No it's fine

Good for what?

P71 or P51 if you're a manlet

Yeah it's good user
I like mine
One recommendation
Disable the dgpu from the bios if you're not planning on gayming or if you're gonna just use Linux

Email patch

Are Gentoo compile times on a T430 acceptable?

Yes perfectly fine
Until you compile Firefox but that's basically every machine right now
You can get firefox-bin though

objectively good

Are there bin packages for stuff like libreoffice and other stuff that takes forever to compile too?

Who uses Firefox anymore in the first place? I switched to SeaMonkey 3 years ago and never had to look back.

My ThinkPad smells like a car air freshener, how do I get rid of the smell?

the ram on my x1 carbon is upgradable, right ?
i didn't lose my money, right?

I don't know I haven't tried libreoffice
Most browsers take long to compile user

>he didn't research this
Lubuntu runs well on 4 gb of ram user

I compiled SeaMonkey in a toaster like 2 years ago and it took 30 minutes or so. qbittorrent was the one that gave me the most trouble taking like 2 hours to compile.

Use case maybe? Requirements?

Nice maybe if I ever come back to gentoo I might try it again

if i look at this comparison, then the improvement in cpu from w520 to p51 seems to be not very big considering p51 costs at least 4 times more.
is this an accurate comparison?
cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-7700HQ-vs-Intel-Core-i7-2860QM/m211019vsm103

I mostly recommended it for the gpu
If you're looking for cpu jumps you're early
Intel hasn't had competition in a while

wait a few weeks
Unfortunately my thinkpad's smell went away
do you not like the way that computers smell?

Does the w520 have pwm flickering?

What's his email?

Wish the retro didn't turn out to be nothing :/

Should be on his website
Patchdynamics

>Liteon

Better feedback, better coating

Yeah
But if you really want a retro then just shell out for a t70 x62 or they're working on a x210 board
>I'm getting the x210 for sure
they're sold by 51nb in china

Which of you autists wrote this book?

Yup, that's what I do. Annoying as fuck when you want to use the mDP port though.

None of us would be caught dead maining a t420s

Whats the optimal trackpoint speed?

>tfw main two thinkpads

>tfw going to fix this broken t420 soon and use it for my daily driver soon
I hope it'll work.

I have to manually do it through the terminal because Mint's drivers don't work
xinput --set-prop "TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint" "Device Accel Constant Deceleration" 0.35"
this works pretty well for me.

The fastest you can control

JUST MAKE THE NONS VERSION ALREADY YOU ARE GETTING SALES BECAUSE NO ONE WANTS A FUCKING S PIECE OF SHIT REEEEEEEEEEE

Will try that one out, thanks user!

agreed.

If someone actually wanted to use a modern 4G sim card in thinkpad t400 how would someone do that?

Make sure the board supports the minipcie
drivers

Got a x220t yesterday lads. Came preinstalled with windows and battery charged fine. Have just put an SSD in the mSATA port (replaced the modem that was there) and installed a fresh copy of windows - but now the battery isn't charging (pic related).
I've checked/reinstalled the battery drivers but its still not charging. I also booted into the original version of windows and its not charging there either so doesn't look like a software problem. The battery was definitely working yesterday because I let it run out then charged it back to 100%. The battery is not warm so not receiving any charge, and the battery light on the lid hasn't lit up like it normally does. I've tried numerous restarts etc but to no avail.
Before I contact the seller, is there something stupid I might be missing? Is it possible there are any wires I could have knocked or similar?

I mean if I do have a t400 that came with sim card reader could I see that in bios? Wouldn't I have to upgrade the sim card thingy so it supports 4g?

Does anyone know what kind of wwan card he is using in this photo?
the whole setup looks really neat.

You would, that's why you need to make sure the board supports the new minipcie card

Is x230 good? I dig the size of X series and it costs 130-140 jewros in my country. No gaymen, just for work on the go

If you can deal with chiclets, sure.

It literally says that over there.

what new pcie card? the mobo support, how do I figure that out. I appreciate the help but I feel like your being ambiguous intentionally.

Probably pic related. When i set Power Manager to charge the battery up to X% that setting persists regardless of the OS i boot, it won't charge past X% even if the ThinkPad is turned off.

I guess you could try installing Power Manager and configure it to fully charge the battery.

its probably just an old battery that's reporting its reduced capacity in a way that windows fudges the report on. i've got batteries of varying ages that the OS says is 95-99% while fully charged. if the seller didnt promise a brand new battery at full capacity, there's nothing worth complaining about

>that setting persists regardless of the OS i boot,
What kind of black magic is this?

Yeah that's it, I'm just an idiot. Let it discharge a little and it started charging no problem.

Can someone help a brainlet like me figure how to get battery reading to just werk. I've got tp_smapi, but I've got no idea if I need to do any configuration.

My t420's volume buttons stopped working.
Is it possible that I damaged them when removing the keyboard from the device, when changing the ram?

Or might it be a manjaro related problem?

>x220
>acpi showing 7% and 16-18 minutes remaining for the last half hour

Is there a more precise program?

create a liveusb with another distro and check if they work
You'd have to be pretty retarded to damage keys when removing the keyboard.

thanks for tolerating my autism

It probably just needs to calibrate. It should be fine after a few charge-discharge cycles.

>we live a timeline where one can't be sure if one can upgrade the RAM on a fucking thinkpad
when did we go so wrong

>You'd have to be pretty retarded to damage keys when removing the keyboard.

Thats what i though. The last time I checked, i wasnt retarded.
What should I do, if they work on the live distro?

install gentoo

search arch wiki for a solution. They should work fine out of the box though. What DE are you using?

Are mSATA SSD worth it? Is there a noticeable real life difference between mSATA and SATA3 SSD?

it doesn't really matter to tell you the truth but on my t420 both the msata and the sata run at sata2 speeds
which also doesn't really matter

no, this happens every time unfortunately.
it always stays at 7 percent for half an hour and then suddenly rapidly goes down.

Is there a thinkpad-tan?

>tan
eh, not really

My i7 x220 boots to windows on an mSATA SSD in ~10 seconds and is pretty speedy to work on. It actually boots a few seconds faster than my desktop which has a modern overclocked i5 and SATA3 SSD.

>no touchpoint

Did the thinkpad meme increase the price of old thinkpads?
Can you get a Dell or HP equivalent of a Thinkpad for cheaper?

No red accents whatsoever, but I'm afraid that's as close as you'll get.
Unless some user who's not artistically impaired draws better one. Bonus points for using X220t

Anyone have any experience with the x260/t460?

I'd like to repeat my earlier comment, but asking for quick tips and tricks this time. Surely some of you have popped the lid on your stinkpads? Is compressed air enough, or am I gonna have to wipe every fan blade down?

In the meantime I reinstalled my W500 and it seems to be running as chilly cool as any 2009 laptop with its discrete GPU turned off. Display's dark as ever though. Needs more RAM.

I have a X260 at work and X250 at home, they are great machines, but not as serviceables as before (soldered CPU and 1 RAM slot)

xfce
Its a fresh install.
The last install worked without any problems..

How well does a t420 in games with an rx480 on an egpu setup? Am i to play the new battlefront game at an acceptable framerate?

i thought that the t420 had sata3

it has sata3 on both the optical drive bay and the main drive bay, maybe he uses a sata2 ssd.

Is there any noticeable difference between x250 and x260?

Is Amazon Certified Refurbished any good for X220s/T420s?

don't waste your money buying refurbished for something that old.
Just get one from ebay for half the price and get some more ram.

I see..

Dunno about T420, but the T430 has SATA3 in Ultrabay and main drive bay, while the mSATA port is SATA2 only. T420 is probably the same.

It is a little slower than SATA 3, but the important thing is that even in SATA 2 it is way faster than a hard drive.

No, you might not really notice a difference if it was SATA 3 because chances are your SSD won't be operating at the peak 500mbps speed anyways even if it was in SATA 3