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
Could someone please tell me the difference between a Chicony and a Liteon keyboard. In your opinion, which one is the best ?
Brandon Richardson
Is a thinkpad tab x1 worth it vs surface pro?
Carson Howard
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.
Jack Gutierrez
Can I replace the ISO keyboard on my T420 with an ANSI one?
Carson Murphy
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?
Jaxon Ortiz
What would be a good workstation replacement for a current year computer? the 520 seems to be a bit old now.
Adrian Diaz
What's a good thinkpad/laptop for no more than $1800?
Liam Morgan
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
Jordan Lewis
>Can I replace the ISO keyboard on my T420 with an ANSI one?
sure it can
Noah Murphy
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?
Liam Sanders
p51 maybe or p71
Hudson James
Purely depends on your usage.
That model is probably the best all-arounder for the price, so you did good pig.
Oliver Turner
it's pretty good price, go for it
Owen Hernandez
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.
Liam Hill
oh yeah you'll be perfectly fine my dude
Josiah Hill
Where are the toaster stickers?
Parker Cruz
No
Jonathan Roberts
No it's fine
Chase Moore
Good for what?
Hudson Nguyen
P71 or P51 if you're a manlet
Xavier Baker
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
William Martin
Email patch
Landon Thomas
Are Gentoo compile times on a T430 acceptable?
Austin Walker
Yes perfectly fine Until you compile Firefox but that's basically every machine right now You can get firefox-bin though
Jayden Richardson
objectively good
Jeremiah Adams
Are there bin packages for stuff like libreoffice and other stuff that takes forever to compile too?
Joshua Gomez
Who uses Firefox anymore in the first place? I switched to SeaMonkey 3 years ago and never had to look back.
Ayden Jenkins
My ThinkPad smells like a car air freshener, how do I get rid of the smell?
Caleb Nelson
the ram on my x1 carbon is upgradable, right ? i didn't lose my money, right?
Cameron Clark
I don't know I haven't tried libreoffice Most browsers take long to compile user
Joseph Murphy
>he didn't research this Lubuntu runs well on 4 gb of ram user
Evan Cruz
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.
Asher Hughes
Use case maybe? Requirements?
Ryder Young
Nice maybe if I ever come back to gentoo I might try it again
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
Angel Sullivan
wait a few weeks Unfortunately my thinkpad's smell went away do you not like the way that computers smell?
Aaron Martinez
Does the w520 have pwm flickering?
Hunter Barnes
What's his email?
Jaxon Richardson
Wish the retro didn't turn out to be nothing :/
Owen Taylor
Should be on his website Patchdynamics
Juan Hughes
>Liteon
Better feedback, better coating
Elijah King
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
Oliver Lopez
Which of you autists wrote this book?
Nathan Hughes
Yup, that's what I do. Annoying as fuck when you want to use the mDP port though.
Jeremiah Peterson
None of us would be caught dead maining a t420s
Jacob Cox
Whats the optimal trackpoint speed?
Isaac Cruz
>tfw main two thinkpads
Anthony Williams
>tfw going to fix this broken t420 soon and use it for my daily driver soon I hope it'll work.
Josiah Richardson
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.
Nicholas Roberts
The fastest you can control
Evan Peterson
JUST MAKE THE NONS VERSION ALREADY YOU ARE GETTING SALES BECAUSE NO ONE WANTS A FUCKING S PIECE OF SHIT REEEEEEEEEEE
Kayden Adams
Will try that one out, thanks user!
agreed.
Jordan Jenkins
If someone actually wanted to use a modern 4G sim card in thinkpad t400 how would someone do that?
Anthony Johnson
Make sure the board supports the minipcie drivers
Jace Gray
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?
Benjamin Nguyen
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?
Gabriel Allen
Does anyone know what kind of wwan card he is using in this photo? the whole setup looks really neat.
Colton Perez
You would, that's why you need to make sure the board supports the new minipcie card
Luis Thompson
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
Henry Fisher
If you can deal with chiclets, sure.
Joshua Murphy
It literally says that over there.
Chase Bell
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.
Oliver Cooper
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.
Nolan Bennett
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
Aiden Davis
>that setting persists regardless of the OS i boot, What kind of black magic is this?
Benjamin Miller
Yeah that's it, I'm just an idiot. Let it discharge a little and it started charging no problem.
Daniel Garcia
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.
Robert Ramirez
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?
Jeremiah Wood
>x220 >acpi showing 7% and 16-18 minutes remaining for the last half hour
Is there a more precise program?
Charles Brooks
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.
Luke Robinson
thanks for tolerating my autism
Anthony Ramirez
It probably just needs to calibrate. It should be fine after a few charge-discharge cycles.
Eli Moore
>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
Samuel Smith
>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?
William Morgan
install gentoo
David Brown
search arch wiki for a solution. They should work fine out of the box though. What DE are you using?
Logan Lee
Are mSATA SSD worth it? Is there a noticeable real life difference between mSATA and SATA3 SSD?
Jaxson Evans
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
Evan Jones
no, this happens every time unfortunately. it always stays at 7 percent for half an hour and then suddenly rapidly goes down.
Michael Foster
Is there a thinkpad-tan?
Angel Gray
>tan eh, not really
Christian Young
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.
Michael Davis
>no touchpoint
Jacob Price
Did the thinkpad meme increase the price of old thinkpads? Can you get a Dell or HP equivalent of a Thinkpad for cheaper?
Samuel Kelly
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
Matthew Watson
Anyone have any experience with the x260/t460?
Carson Reyes
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.
Hudson Cook
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)
Nicholas Wilson
xfce Its a fresh install. The last install worked without any problems..
Jayden Smith
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?
John Rivera
i thought that the t420 had sata3
Benjamin Harris
it has sata3 on both the optical drive bay and the main drive bay, maybe he uses a sata2 ssd.
Sebastian Scott
Is there any noticeable difference between x250 and x260?
Hudson Gonzalez
Is Amazon Certified Refurbished any good for X220s/T420s?
Adam Sanchez
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.
Jack Flores
I see..
Jackson Parker
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.
Jeremiah Jones
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