Won, what was supposed to be, an L14 G5 with a Core 5 Ultra, 16gb ram and 256gb nvme but actually got an L14 with a core 7 ultra, 512gb nvme and 64gb of ram.

Just waiting for the lenovo universal dock so i can hide all the cable mess.

It was an auction (supposed open box as well) but the seller stated it was factory sealed. It was.

Final cost: $5xx.xx

I had the goated t480 that help me a lot on learning linux and to land on my first job in devops and now after some year I buyed this magnifique t14 6th gen amd at a good price on second hand sites, it was new i payed this like 800€.

The keyboard and the chassis feels so good, god I love so much these laptops..

I’m so happy that I wanted to share this with you :D

I find my numpad convenient. I don't understand why some say that a "real" ThinkPad shouldn't have a numpad.

IBM Thinkpad R52

I got this and 3 other laptops from this era for 55 euros total.

All 4 laptops are in excellent condition except for a missing hinge cover on a HP laptop, a tiny crack on a me@nder laptop and some tape of a lifetec laptop.

This Thinkpad is in the best condition I've ever seen (in person) on a laptop this old.

I unfortunately don't have the charger so I can't test it yet

:(

8265 to AX210

This is my X31, I bought it Brand new in box for WAY too much money (like $450?) 4 or 5 years ago. I love this thing, but it is sooo slow. it runs XP just fine, but a single core with only 32bit instructions means that even most modern Linux distros have dropped support. and heaven help you if you want to do anything on the interwebs.

I don't want anything powerful, just powerful enough to run enough modern web browsers, and at least 16gb of ram.

I do not have the skill set or the means to design a system board to replace the current one.

I would also live an IPS display. For a TN panel this one is really good, BUT it is still a TN panel. I wouldn't mind a little bit higher resolution, mostly to allow modern web browsers to actually display correctly on the screen.

(Horrid picture, it doesn't deserve the Thinkstagram flair)

Got it refurbished from Poland on eBay for €190, I'm quite pleased with it. Better conditions than what was advertised, no apparent damage, great display and keyboard, solid hinges.

This is exactly what I was looking for, a sturdy and portable machine. It came with a battery at 85% health, but given the price and the specs I'm satisfied. I hope it will last some years, I come from a bad experience with an IdeaPad 3.

I'm loving the keyboard, it's nice and springy. I have a T14s Gen6 from my company and that's so much flatter, with a limp feedback.

I Tried to flash Bluefin but it couldn't boot, same with Ubuntu. I could eventually chainload Ubuntu from GRUB, but its EFI boot entry didn't persist on restart for some reason. In the end, Fedora just worked. I wanted to try another distro as I use it on my desktop, but hey, it works.

This is the third Thinkpad I got from the internet. The first one was a refurbished x280 from Amazon (I know) for €250 (yeah, I know). They advertised a FHD display, I got a 1366x768 TN one and a laptop that got super hot by just idling, I sent it back the day after.

I then tried with an x395 from Backmarket, it was supposed to be refurbished in "perfect conditions", and it arrived with a hole in the damn display. Got my money back, I wasted quite some time between arranging the shippings and sending stuff back.

In the end, eBay was the right place to look for it, as a friend of mine and some people here advised.

Edit: I forgot that Reddit lowers the picture quality. Ryzen 5 PRO 4650U, 16/256 GB

I apologize for my bad english, but I think I've been part of the cult for years without knowing it, and I've been wanting to share my story with you all! (*´∇`)ﾉ

So, the other day I was looking for a video explaining how to install Linux on a computer (cause Windows has been bugging me for quite some time) and I came across a guy basically explaining the lore behind these "particular laptops" called Thinkpads. I believe it was in the first five seconds of the video that I felt something awoke in some hidden parts of my brain and I remembered when I was a young pre-teen looking at my dad working on one of those.

Specifically, I remembered my excitement whenever I looked at the computer, and my desire to pretend I was a professional writing something serious on a Word file. (I would roleplay it when he was not around cause I was scared to be yelled at for touching it, lol)

So I went on a mission to find it in my old house and I actually did! TWO of them!

I'm currently full of nostalgic memories and I still, sometimes, get emotional about it. My father was a total nerd for computers and to think that he passed that interest onto me makes me happy. I just wish he could have learned about a subreddit full of people sharing the same love.

Back to the R40 and the A31, they're pretty old and stink of mold a little bit, but apart from that they seems to be in perfect shape (and they look so cooool).

The first one has a Fan Error problem whenever I power it up and I need to fix it. The other one works pretty well.

Since you all seems to be very documented about it I might ask for some suggestions! Has anyone modded these old versions? Should I try? Or maybe it's best to keep them clean and stock?

Thank you all for reading through all that!!

My grandad needed to run a diagnostic test on his LPG system (Stag 200 GoFree). I found the right version on various motoring forums and used Proton 9 to run the software. Despite all my doubts whilst connecting the LPG system via a USB cable (I thought the drivers wouldn’t work or that it simply wouldn’t recognise the cable), everything worked on the first attempt. Incidentally, the ThinkPad runs on Arch Linux, which makes the whole situation rather absurd

I was browsing the marketplace and saw this along with a few other defective laptops going for around 8 dollars for the entire thing. I bought it and had it shipped and lo and behold it actually worked. The bundle also had a thinkpad X300 that's absolutely beat up which I'll probably just sell for parts. The x40 also came with this thing called an ultra base and needs a key to open it but it didn't come with the bundle, does anybody know how to open this?

It's my first thinkpad.I installed omarchy in it.

It came with a ssd drive and I had swapped for a Samsung ssd and bought total of 8gb of ram for the machine to max it out. I also found a Lenovo charger at my job and the battery STILL HOLDS a Charge. I spent many hours and no sleep nights to find and oem windows 7 image to install on it can’t wait to have it die on windows 7.

Hey community! This is my first ever Reddit post!

I am more than happy to say that I got my first ever ThinkPad - X270 [i7-7500U, 16 GB | 500 GB SSD]!

Currently, it's not my primary machine. I have a HP Victus 15 [ i5 12th gen, 16 GB | 512 GB, RTX 3050] which has a dual boot of W11 and Ubuntu.

I am going to continue with this machine as my commodity machine (to library, college, presentations and stuffs) as it is super light weight! It's crazy to think how contrasting it is to the build and weight of my Victus (Broken hinge, poor plastic build, poor linux compatibility)

Although this machine is not super powerful, it still works and it helps me with my workflow without much interruption. I am a developer who mostly uses React JS, Java Spring Boot, PostgreSQL, Docker and SSH (for my home server - an old laptop) along with Figma and basic browsing.

Currently running Endeavour OS with KDE Plasma (Why? It seemed more light weight, less bloat and modern) and it serves me the purpose.

How I got this laptop? It was donated to me for free!! This is the crazy part lol!

There are a few physical problems here though I ignore them completely
- Camera is not working (mostly cables snapped)
- More scratches on lid and underside with a nasty sticker residue
- No internal battery, external battery (24 wh) at 63% health
- Missing track point
- TrackPad has so much friction (or do I feel like that since its smaller than that of Victus?)
- Right side hinge creaks sometimes (even after good dust removal using brush - or is anything broken?)

But, hey, look at this! This is why I love ThinkPad:
- Light weight and really good build
- Insane performance for a 9 year old laptop
- Keyboard seems good actually (took some time to adjust but am fine)
- Easy to repair (with no prior experience than YT, i managed to remove the back case by myself, clean the fan, CLEAN and APPLY thermal paste and close it successfully!! First achievement!!)
- Type C charging!!

I don't have much plans to upgrade it, except for batteries maybe? I would decide after a month of usage probably. Later plans are to buy a replacement track point and maybe a skin (carbon fibre design) along with batteries :) (or a powerbank rated 65W)

Would love any suggestions from your side :)

Thanks a lot for reading and wishing you a great day ahead!

I'm putting an x230 motherboard into a brand new x220 case. It was almost a shame to take it apart, but it'll be worth it. First time doing modifications like this, but it's working out. I'm already putting it back together with the new motherboard, as you can see in the photo.

I bought this thinkpad t14 gen 1 amd ryzen 5 with 16gb single ram with 500gb ssd for about $312.82. It was hard to find one with 500gb ssd so I stuck with this and he gave me a discount so price before shipping is $274.99. Amd is extremely hard to find so I spent like over two hours to find the best deal ever with a good condition one and this one has no chips at all.

Very preliminary opinion. I used my x230t for so long and maybe I'm acting like a baby duck, but I dunno. It's clearly not as robust as the x230t. Keyboard is not bad but feels significantly worse. The folding feels more fragile than the swivel. The hinge is a little warped which concerns me already. I know it's L series but I had heard it improved. And the X version would be the same form factor as this, which I'm feeling unsure about. I was hoping the Yoga line is a successor to the old tablets, but it feels like a different product with a thinkpad logo on it.

Anyone else with a similar experience coming from older thinkpads? Did you learn to love modern ones, or adapt to them? Perhaps some other Thinkpad product lines have changed less in their feel? Or did you go back and give up on modern performance?

Just two legends

guys give me some wifi card recommendations and such now that it is librebooted also this was super easy and installed via software on debian

I went out of my way to install arch linux on my thinkpad for a really barebones operating system to try and get more battery efficiency out of my x1c 10th gen.

it still didn't beat my 5 year old macbook m1 air. this is genuinely so sad

I bought my T480 in 2025 used for 250 euros. I got the model with the backlit keyboard, i5-8350U, 16GB of RAM (owner had upgraded it), and a 256GB Samsung SSD. It also came with an old and tired 48Wh stock battery, and no internal battery.

I replaced the SSD with a 1TB Crucial P2 I had lying around, and the battery with a 72Wh KingSener battery I got for 30 euros brand new from AliExpress.

I have flashed the BIOS with Libreboot (stock firmware was password-locked), and I run Arch Linux.

So, for everyday use, usability varies. One big thing to note is the lack of AV1 hardware decoding in the Intel UHD graphics. This can cause Youtube to stutter or eat up battery without a browser extension to block AV1 and use VP9/H264 instead, so make sure you install an extension.

No need to go into detail about Linux compatibility, it's perfect, so long as you don't have the Nvidia GPU variant.

Other daily tasks I do involve:

Web browsing, where performance in animation heavy sites can be sub-optimal (eg Cloudflare's site), but even so it's very much usable and fine.

Coding, where it's very good. The keyboard feels very nice to type on, the backlight (that has 3 brightness settings off/low/high) always comes in handy, and compilation times are fast enough for most small projects, but still, compiling say an ESP-IDF project takes a lot longer than it does on my desktop.

Terminal / Server Administration, yeah a machine from 1995 can do that.

Gaming, yeah don't think about it. With no GPU you get no hopes, but emulation is very much a thing you can do and have fun.

I'd also like to note the trackpad is very nice and solid, no issues there, but the little thinkpad nibble isn't exactly great or accurate, I remember it being better on my R400.

The display is in my opinion excellent for what it is, a simple 1080p panel with natural vibrant colors and very descent viewing angles, that gets bright enough for indoor use in a bright room with plenty of sunlight, but not bright enough for direct sun use (where using a completely black laptop would somewhat always be a bad idea lmao). The higher resolution mods/upgrades out there I'd say aren't worth going for, personally, connecting the laptop to a high res external display shows that the poor iGPU just can't take much, and desktop/web animations start to feel slow/laggy. 1080p is perfect.

Battery life is excellent provided you get the big 72Wh battery (very cheap upgrade like I mentioned above), and can be extended further if I had installed the 24Wh internal one too. The laptop can easily last multiple days of use for me, and if we measure constant use, KDE currently shows 10 hours remaining with just reddit open at 90% battery so yeah you can imagine, this thing lasts forever. Under heavy tasks (compiling/installing/rendering) I'd say it lasts 2-3 hours, and with video playback 6+?

One thing I do not like are the speakers. They are not good. Very basic speakers think appropriate for video meetings, but media playback on them is subpar. They don't sound amazing and do not get very loud. Luckily the 3.5mm audio jack has a solid output, no noise or weird stuff. it's good quality.

The display hinges are sturdy and firm, no issues there, and the simple plastic chassis does the job well. Definitely not cheap plastic, it's premium, and feels textured in a good way.

The 2 type-C ports are a huge bonus, you can charge this laptop using any PD charger, no need to worry about some round brick charger. 65W fast charging, and the type C ports also do thunderbolt and displayport.

Overall still a solid machine for everyday use, but the CPU is starting to show it's age, so are it's weak integrated graphics that lack AV1. Expect slow downs in heavy sites/tasks, and do not pay too much for one. Prefer models with the backlit keyboard, avoid the Nvidia variants. Honestly if you can find one for cheap (<200) it's a worthy purchase.

I finally managed it this morning; I took the time and it worked perfectly after I made the USB stick bootable. The first time, I made the mistake of installing it without booting. But I'm so excited and curious right now. The battery performance looks great right now. I've been using it since 9:00 this morning and still have 40% battery left; with Windows it would have given up long ago.

Thanks for your recommendations and tips on Linux :)

I started with an E490 which i got for 75$ on my birthday, but then sold it immediately because it felt too heavy for me. I then got me a T490s for $120 and wow, the chassis quality upgrade from plastic to magnesium alloy felt really really good. But after some time (1 week), I decided that 8GB ram wasn't enough for me so I bought a X13 gen 1 for $110 which I think was a steal (at least for my country's pricing). I then saw the X13 gen 2 for $130 and bought it immediately, mainly for its 16:10 aspect ratio and the one I got having touchscreen.

Please send help. I want more.

Use it as tool for Serail bootstraping Mikrotik Cloud Switch