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Any particular reason why? I’ve heard people complain about newer ThinkPads, but haven’t heard much negative about older ones, such as the one in this article. They do seem to be very popular, and unfortunately for some operating systems they’re one of the few “safe” options with hardware support. I personally haven’t found any particular laptop brand or model I particularly loved.
My t430 is already equipped with 16gb ram and modded EC so I can use cheap 3rd party batteries and the OG 7 row keyboard instead of the trash 6 row island keyboard. There are still some upgrades to be made like i7 QM cpu, and a 1600x900 IPS screen, but I just can't justify the costs anymore.
The reason for moving to t480 soon is that I'll be doing the t25 frankenpad mod solely just for the 7 row keyboard. Better power effiecient cpu, nvme and high res screen is a cherry on top.
So far my thinkpad experience has been superb, and both my machines t410 + t430 have survived many drops and various liquid spills(water/coffee/alcohol) and besides replacing the keyboard, I had 0 issues. Hopefully the t480 will be similar experience.
What surprised me the most is that Lenovo ships something as annoying as a loud fan (easily replaceable even for a home tinkerer). Of course they save a few pennies per laptop; but no laptop can ever be good if it's noisy. That was one of the main reasons why I bought an X301 ThinkPad many years ago, even when it fanned like crazy it was very quiet. But the clever design of the original ThinkPad's was starting to fade already then; the X301 actually had it's speakers on top. So you could spill liquid on it, unless you happened to spill it on top of one of your top mounted speakers of course.
I've also gone through a few ThinkPad's over the years, and ever since they stopped being IBM; they seem to loose more and more of the "premium feel" for every generation. Especially the keyboard is way better on my old T40 then on the one I use right now (T14).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the hardcore guys have literally ripped out the motherboard and installed a completely different motherboard with a modern i7 CPU. So, a CPU upgrade? How is that not what OP mentions? The LCD upgrade is also on the wishlist..
> So, a CPU upgrade? How is that not what OP mentions? Are you asking how replacing the motherboard in a laptop with a custom third party hobbyist replacement is different from putting a faster CPU in a CPU socket?
"To make this machine viable in 2021, you need the CPU, RAM and SSD upgrades at the very minimum" This is not really a 2012 machine any more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus
This laptop doesn't have a dedicated GPU and while I love my old thinkpad, a third generation i7 isn't powerful enough to do 4k h265 decoding and physically lacks any hardware acceleration for vp8, vp9 and both 8 and 10 bit h265. 1080p content is fine but with 4k it will start to struggle. This author doesn't seem to be using the laptop for multimedia consumption, but I would like to bring this limitation up for anyo…
After upgrading the display, CPU, disk, RAM, fan, battery it's a bit click-baity to say you've gone back to a 2012 ThinkPad - but interesting read non the less. What surprised me the most is that Lenovo ships something as annoying as a loud fan (easily replaceable even for a home tinkerer). Of course they save a few pennies per laptop; but no laptop can ever be good if it's noisy. That was one of the main reasons why…
I had a visitor over the holidays who needed to work but didn't have a laptop. I had 2x old T420 (released in 2011) so I combined the RAM and did a fresh OS install. My only hassle was finding a DP cable. Other than doubling the RAM, this was still a stock machine from 2011. CPU benchmark scores for this T420 are comparable/better than sub-£400 new x86 laptops available at big box stores which was the other short-ter…
Let's circle back in a few months; I too feel nostalgic when I visit my dad's and play some classic games on the old faithful PC from my youth (still rocking a 17'' Trinitron CRT). But after a few hours reality hits since I use my PCs nowadays to actually... get stuff done. I can't imagine that PC would be very useful for any productivity work, at most (frustratingly slow) browsing.
I used a dual-core upgraded T430 for quite a while. The problem was actually the battery life. 2-3 hours just doesn't compare to a M1 Macbook's 13 hours.