51–60 of 105 posts
Apparently those Thinkpads are from 2011-2012, that's old. What do people do with such old devices that makes building a battery from scratch worthwhile?
But it shows how irrationally our society is set up in some aspects. In an ideal world, you could just send the Lenovo engineer a mail and ask for the firmware source. But the incentives are such that they keep it secret, probably because they make a lot of money with batteries. So hackers spend a lot of time reverse engineering stuff. It seems really inefficient.
As an owner of a T420 and x230 thank you but these laptops are too old. The CPUs use like 25w, the screens are 99% really bad TN screens and a few touchscreen IPS on the x220t and x230t. The screens are the deal breaker. Lugging around a heavy laptop or a small laptop with a crappy screen sucks. The new generation starting wirh 40s are modern battery can have internal and external batteries and the screens aren't ove…
It really speaks to how badly innovation has slowed in chip design that a 10+ year old budget laptop is still comptitive hardware
The new CPUs don't put much more power, but they're crippled by the mitigations (old ones too but weren't when you used them), use way less power, many are fanless (saving more power), and it's not like anyone was struggling with not enough power on computer anyway. Intel had innovated a lot, especially their video decoding and graphics.
I'll take a crappier CPU with a better screen any day but luckily I don't have to choose with these.
As an owner of a T420 and x230 thank you but these laptops are too old. The CPUs use like 25w, the screens are 99% really bad TN screens and a few touchscreen IPS on the x220t and x230t. The screens are the deal breaker. Lugging around a heavy laptop or a small laptop with a crappy screen sucks. The new generation starting wirh 40s are modern battery can have internal and external batteries and the screens aren't ove…
The rest of the package makes up for it, for me. The keyboard is fantastic, the CPU is more than fast enough, enough ports, they're rugged as hell, and I can get at the parts to swap them out when they fail. It's always been a desktop replacement for me, so lugging it about was rare. I can forgive the screen. Mine spends most of its time plugged into a monitor anyway these days. I think the graphics chip might be on…
Wait until you get a T440P. About the same, but way more powerful and the screen and battery life are way better. Only like $120 usually and even less pretty often. The batteries are cheap and genuine too. I'm looking forward to more devices like the surface so Keyboards aren't attached to laptops anymore. The new Lenovo keyboard is pretty good but it's expensive!
As an owner of a T420 and x230 thank you but these laptops are too old. The CPUs use like 25w, the screens are 99% really bad TN screens and a few touchscreen IPS on the x220t and x230t. The screens are the deal breaker. Lugging around a heavy laptop or a small laptop with a crappy screen sucks. The new generation starting wirh 40s are modern battery can have internal and external batteries and the screens aren't ove…
I use a T480 now, which seems to be the new sweet spot, as it's the last model made that has the combo internal + hot swappable external battery, and has a really nice wqhd panel option. Models with this panel are super rare on eBay, but you can still find the panel and cable and perform the swap yourself (slightly terrifying, though).
With the big external battery, I get around 10-12 hours (idles at ~6 watts), and combined with the lighter weight I now have an actual laptop again.
One slightly annoying thing about battery management controller though... You have no control over which cell it's going to discharge first. It seems to try and preferentially discharge whichever cell it thinks is less degraded. This makes sense in principle to keep cell wear even, but it would be nice to have an override.
For example, If you have two external batteries but it chooses to discharge the internal battery first, then you may not be able to hot swap by the time the external battery is discharged. It switches batteries at 5%, but by the time the other one is dead, 5% may be closer to zero - another parameter that would be nice to be able to change... Why not switch over at 15%?
Anyway, maybe in a few years when cells for this model are no longer available, someone will figure out how to write custom firmware for the BMC to give us these features.
This is a cool project, and I love it when somebody "takes back" their hardware a little bit or keeps them useful through hacking instead of throwing it away. But it shows how irrationally our society is set up in some aspects. In an ideal world, you could just send the Lenovo engineer a mail and ask for the firmware source. But the incentives are such that they keep it secret, probably because they make a lot of mon…
I don't think this generation had DRM on the batteries. The new ones did and they're not cracked.
Apparently those Thinkpads are from 2011-2012, that's old. What do people do with such old devices that makes building a battery from scratch worthwhile?
Even coding is generally doable (unless your project is extremely massive).
It gets the job done, even if it's not as fast as recent laptop (which is in turn not as fast as a recent desktop).
Also, buying these things can make a lot of sense for some people.
For example, in my case, I'm a big fan of cheap laptop (usually secondhand thinkpad) + decent desktop.
On one hand a decent desktop is much faster than almost any laptops available (and the few laptops that are faster have issues like heat, low battery life and being heavy).
On the other, a small Thinkpad (ex: x250) is a good enough compromise when on the go. Also, as it's quite cheap (if secondhand), so it's not dramatic if it gets damaged which is always more likely for mobile objects. A few years back, I slipped on a patch of ice, felt on my old x61, and completely broke the screen, I just bought another x61 and swapped the disk and it only set me back 130 euros which not as bad as breaking a brand new macbook pro in the same manner for example.
So, yes, in the end, it's worthwhile to maintain them and do things like changing the battery or replacing faulty components. And the after market for this things is quite developed, you can pretty much find any components on ebay or other web sites (I just did it last week with a broken DC jack replacement on an x230). Combine with the fact these are some of the easiest laptops to disassemble, it makes them remarkably serviceable.
A large company buys Thinkpad as a brand and launches a few shiny Linux Laptops