The T420 has been my main daily driver for nearly 6 years (using it right now to type this!) and I super excited to check this post out in more depth as battery duration is one of my biggest personal complaints about the system. To those wondering about the T420, they are fantastically rugged and I still think they are the best laptop on the market assuming you can handle either a slightly crap monitor or the hassle…
> ..dropped them onto concrete, dremeled them, even lit them on fire
I gotta ask, what motivation or situation led to your Thinkpad being lit on fire!?
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?
The T420 is old, but still has some advantages over laptops currently on the market. Up until 2018 many laptops still had dual core cpus like the i7-7500u which are worse than the i7-3840qm that can be put in a T420, and the few currently available laptops that have 1440p displays and quad core cpus are still pretty expensive. Some other reasons people still use the laptop are being able to use coreboot with it and t…
Not old. Perhaps forever young. My T420 is 9 years old, both batteries are shot but that's my 'desktop', also have an X220, identical last-of-a-generation keyboards, with a fresh 9 cell battery for when on the move. Upgraded with SSDs and RAM; probably not great for gaming or video editing, but no interest in that and there's a PCMCIA bay sitting there just for such applications. I can't see myself changing for at least 5 years, and wouldn't change to something that doesn't have an excellent keyboard, which rules out most laptops including and especially Mac, nor something which can is hardened enough to survive being a little bashed on the floor, in backpack, left outside in sun or snow.
> I don't think this generation had DRM on the batteries. The new ones did and they're not cracked. TIL that there are DRM even on batteries. What a sad state of affairs.
DRM on batteries of expensive electronics seems consumer-friendly to me. Most consumers' experience with battery replacement would be sending it for replacement by a technician. Battery DRM would make it difficult for the consumer to end up with an unsafe battery in their device and pockets.
It doesn't seem consumer friendly to me. Aside from laptop, phone is five years old, replaced (consumer serviceable) battery twice (Very consumer friendly phone.
The T420 is old, but still has some advantages over laptops currently on the market. Up until 2018 many laptops still had dual core cpus like the i7-7500u which are worse than the i7-3840qm that can be put in a T420, and the few currently available laptops that have 1440p displays and quad core cpus are still pretty expensive. Some other reasons people still use the laptop are being able to use coreboot with it and t…
For reference, I just looked up the benchmarks for the i7 3840qm. Seems to perform in the same ballpark as an i5 10210u for multicore, which is the base cpu in the current thinkpads. Intel really hasn’t made faster cpu’s in a long time. https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/929 https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/intel-core-i5-10210...
The 3840QM has three times the TDP of a 10210U. A modern 45W part is going to be that much faster. Meanwhile the modern 15W part is also going to be a lot better in bursty single core desktop workloads.
DRM on batteries of expensive electronics seems consumer-friendly to me. Most consumers' experience with battery replacement would be sending it for replacement by a technician. Battery DRM would make it difficult for the consumer to end up with an unsafe battery in their device and pockets.
It doesn't seem consumer friendly to me. Aside from laptop, phone is five years old, replaced (consumer serviceable) battery twice ( Very consumer friendly phone.
When counterfeit batteries can explode and cause serious injury or death, I consider any measures to have the device reject counterfeit batteries consumer-friendly.
It's no different if you replace it yourself, that's tangential to my point. You'd be sourcing a specialized replacement battery online and there's a risk that the battery you get is an unsafe knockoff.
That is a different problem. I've also been able to buy non-knock off batteries for just about all electronics up to a few years ago when companies decided that soldered in batteries shorten the time-to-landfill of their products improving their revenues. Seriously: there is no reason why there could not be a standard form factor for battery cells. If we can do hard drives, CPUs and RAM I'm sure we can do batteries t…
You're still talking past me. A standard form factor won't solve the trust problem.
Most people don't know how to choose a proper hard drive compatible with their M.2 adapter or cable for their USB device. Many people also buy counterfeit USB sticks and SSDs that don't have near the capacity they advertise. You and other tech-literate people aren't the only consumers manufacturers are selling to. Nor are people always sufficiently educated, or living among stores with sufficient reputation to source from a reputable aftermarket vendor for their replacements.
Not quite the same model, but I use an X230 (2013 model) as my primary machine at the moment (not counting the company-provided machine I use for work). It’s still a really nice machine, easy to service, and they’re dirt cheap on eBay!
Any recommendations for a new battery for the X230?
Honestly, mostly I'll buy Lenovo-branded batteries on eBay for these things and hope they're new old stock and not counterfeit (or are at least high quality regardless). That is the biggest worry I have about using older laptops though; spec-wise, an old used laptop can honestly be just fine for a lot of people, myself included.
I'm glad hobbyist projects like this exist, but I wish they didn't have to.
The T420 is old, but still has some advantages over laptops currently on the market. Up until 2018 many laptops still had dual core cpus like the i7-7500u which are worse than the i7-3840qm that can be put in a T420, and the few currently available laptops that have 1440p displays and quad core cpus are still pretty expensive. Some other reasons people still use the laptop are being able to use coreboot with it and t…
>laptops that have quad core cpus are still pretty expensive They are really not. If you are after performance on a tight budget, you can get a ThinkPad E14 with 6-core (that's 6 physical cores) Ryzen APU and 16GB of RAM for under 900 dollars [1]. You still get a good quality keyboard and the trackpoint nub if that's your thing (I'm a happy user of an older Thinkpad E485). https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpa…
I was looking at the T14 AMD laptop a few days ago, if it had a 4k or 1440p display option I'd considering getting it.