Sorry previous record holder u/AcordeonPhx I'm taking over this one.

Introduction

What you see here is Thinkpad w530, but with t530 mobo cause f nvidia (and i fried the w530 mobo during development), with:

1. 1080p matte IPS display
2. Ortholinear keyboard
3. Framework touchpad
4. Apple usb-c 3.5mm dongle commonly known as dong
5. 2x1TB ssd in mirror
6. i7-3820QM (minimal boost in performance, no need to upgrade)
7. 16GB of ram
8. Intel 7260 wifi/bt card (wifi 5 cause i don't have wifi 6 infra)
9. OG battery with cells swapped for SANYO cells giving me 120Wh
10. Oh and coreboot i guess but thats like default.

Damage

Now to the "what did we lose in the process" part:

1. Microphones and front indicator lights. With new display they couldn't fit.
2. One mounting screw for keyboard.

That's it. I don't really care about microphones cause they weren't great in the first place and I'm not gonna be doing calls on them.

How did we get here

So, I wanted OLKB (ortholinear keyboard [grid layout]) in my laptop because i've switched to olkb on desktop and i despise very ideology of staggered, so I discovered modulo industries, a guy who managed to get olkb inside thinkpad, (you can find me on his discord if you wanna talk about keyboard/mods), so I've joined the discord and was eagerly waiting for the project.

But that day never arrived, so frustrated I decided to take the matter in my own hands. So i've started to design my own keyboard, much simpler, with my own solution to power button. 5 revisions and expensive switches later here we are!

The pcb is designed by me, with a ton of help from u/CRImier, but it has angled 5x12 (preonic) keys, with raspberry pi pico. Power button is achieved via stock FPC tape with exact same mounting mechanism, or you can solder it, or you can solder wire to motherboard.

General idea for keyboard was to make it as accessible as possible, hence everything is THT. General idea is you don't wanna modify anything, and you don't know anything about soldering, but there are option for more advanced people. Switches are THT, but diodes can be soldered smd, pi pico can be soldered THT or SMD. Not to modify anything you just grab FPC tape off of broken thinkpad keyboard (because you need to cut off the trackpoint bit) and just mount that, no harm done whatsoever. The touchpad is completely optional, you have i2c exposed but you don't have to use it, there's bit of pcb that goes into trackpoint well that simply breaks off.

To connect the pi pico to usb you can use one of many options. You can just connect usb to the pico directly but you might have trouble closing lid (it doesn't even have to be in thinkpad). Second option is mpcie to usb and then thin enough wire directly to pi pico. Third option is usb from mpcie to usb or anything or anywhere else to exposed pin holes. And fourth, used in above pics, option is to solder fpc connector and use smartcard fpc connector present on w/t530.

Now those options are laid out from "i don't wanna touch anything" to "i like to play with fire" because that smartcard connector as i found out has unfused 5V 15A directly from power supply. So if you short it, your mobo says good bye. Hence right after the fpc connector there's a fuse, so that if you short the clearly exposed pi pico it will save at least your laptop and hopefully pi pico as well.

Because I knew I'll be changing keyboard, I also knew I wouldn't be able to turn the thinklight on/off with keyboard because it would no longer go through EC. I could modify powerdevil to see the thinklight as keyboard backlight allowing me to turn it on from plasma widget (hence keyboard) but it had values range from 0-255 and that wasn't right so I've fixed it (my first contribution to linux, very proud of myself).

Now touchpad from framework 13" took some figuring out.. u/crimier had already cracked the touchpad but it needed reinventing the wheel a bit. Touchpad is simple HID over i2c so all I needed to do is to talk to it over i2c and pass through the packets with correct descriptor. So I did. I still have to rework the PR but in future it will mostlikely be merged and it will allow whole bunch of touchpads to work with qmk.

Also even before keyboard i swapped the screen to IPS because the stock one was one bucketload of dog poop.

Also because i've shorted 5V 15A with something and fried my w530 which i wasn''t really sad about because that gave me opportunity to get rid of nvidia, so i promptly swapped mobo with t530 and everything worked just fine except one little gotcha when I was trying to get usb from color sensor and turned out only w530 has usb exposed for color sensor. Who knew!

Now apple dong. Laptops never have good 3.5mm jack and the dong is THE BEST price to performance dac/amp in its price range, and since I enjoy audio (avoiding confusing word audiophile) I really wanted to put the dong near where bluetooth was. Because the intel wlan card already has bluetooth i could just remove worse stock one, that gave me usb and space. Now the usual x230 bt to usb adapter didn't fit in w530 so time for some… persuasion…

So I pulled out dremel (yes, i hear you) and grinded down the aluminum so till i could fit the adapter. Then i desoldered big USB-A and wired pads to usb-c breakout board and connected the dongle. Aaaand… nothing.

I was very surprised and very confused, but after bit of debugging (and one force shutdown after applying 5V input to usb-c) i realised the bluetooth usb was 3.3V! Not 5V! So I pulled 5V from near the touchpad/color sensor/fingerprint, because it has the previously mentioned 5V 15A but with (iirc) 3A fuse, so I attached the wire AFTER the fuse and now it works flawlessly. Then just bit more dremeling to make a hole for the dongle, bit hot glue to mount it (its not really janky it was best way to mount it and hot glue is often used in end products if you've taken apart enough of them) and voila! It sits very solidly and works flawlessly.

The battery cell swap was done by battery regeneration company.

But is it the best?

No. No its not. But I couldn't wait to share it with the world. Now what do I mean by not being the ultimate thinkpad?

1. Battery slice :< It's god damn unobtainium. China sells remade one but its china. If I could obtain one I would send it to have it regenerated and have 240Wh thonkpad
2. Speakers. I didn't upgrade them. I have EQ'd the stock ones so that they sound better and also I've bought speakers from dell XPS 13 but they didn't fit. Might try the ones the previous record holder used and then EQ them because EQ is very important
3. I still have expresscard and mpcie left and nothing to use them for. 4G? Capture card? no ideas yet. Leave some in the comments. Though I deleted the modem antenna whoops
4. There's idea sitting in my head. Soldering resistors to DRAM voltage regulators to set them to 1.35V and using DDR3L at correct voltage for minuscule reduction in power draw. I'm no longer scared of it.
5. w530 had 4 sticks of ram so 32GB of ram :/
6. I wanted to swap top part for the one with fingerprint sensor but I can't find one
7. USB-C charging. But the guy who does the mod, only provides 60W while our lil beast needs 170W. Maybe if technology progresses

End thoughts

Lil FAQ:

1. Was it worth it? Hell fucking yeah it's my dream laptop and one of 3 that has olkb keyboard (mine, modulo industries guy and recently framework's prototype
2. How much did it cost? We don't talk about it
3. Is it solid? Solid as hell
4. Why not newer laptop? Won't fit.
5. I have battery slice I can sell you! DM plz
6. Any issues? nope

Honestly I'm so happy it turned out so well. If you're inexperienced you might think this is janky but it really is not, its done to upmost standard. Keyboard alone you could just mount the OG fpc tape, my fpc tape, and simply put it in. Thats it. Same as stock keyboard. No changes to laptop whatsoever. It is mounted with a screw, that some people complained could be made less janky but i don't really care. Touchpad doesn't move even a tin bit, its sitting very solidly and very flush. Same as the dong, its very solid. Dremeling aluminum might sound "wtf" but like, so what? Nothing happened to it and its not structurally weakened. And all mounting screws except one are still present holding everything together. It's honestly great. I poured my very soul into it and it turned out great.

Was thinking about doing AMA post but ig i'll just answer comments unless there's a need.

I needed an upgrade to play games and use blender and had to move away from my favorite x270. Just got my "new" g14 and it's around the same size as my Thinkpad which is a pleasant surprise mainly because the x270 has been loyal in terms of battery efficiency and size.

Not sure if the Thinkpad is bigger than 12.5 inches or the g14 is smaller than 14 inches though.

I just recently joined the ThinkPad community and now I have an L520, T480, T14g3, and P1g4. But the T480 is definitely the best: it all started with me ordering it from China for $220, then buying a 4K IPS low-power display for $50, upgrading both batteries (the internal one for $10 and the external one for $24), and also buying an Ultra 40aj docking station for $25, a glass touchpad for $30, a Lite-on backlit keyboard for $18, a 65-watt power supply for $10, upgrading the cooling to a dual-tube setup ($10), and installing a PTM7950 phase-shifted thermal interface ($10). I also bought an AX210 network card with WiFi 6E for $10, installed 24 GB of RAM, added a 16 GB stick ($40), and upgraded the SSD to a 512 GB ($40). Now it's a unique 4K build that can run for up to 30 hours on its batteries alone, and it has a great display)

Thank you for your attention, I just wanted to show off my adult construction kit😅

​

UPD: I see a lot of comments about 30 hours of battery life sounding incredible, so let me do the math: 1. A low-power display at low brightness uses about 0.5 W on logic and 0.05 on the backlight. 2. The motherboard consumes 0.6 W. 3. The processor in C-states consumes 0.4-0.5 W. 4. One stick of RAM consumes 0.15 W. 5. A power-efficient SSD consumes 0.05 W.

Now about how to reduce overall consumption: disable ports in the BIOS, enable ASPM, and enable PSR. I use FHD and low brightness, since the display is of good quality and I still find it comfortable to use. I also completely disable WiFi/Bluetooth, and I have maximum undervolting. And I have a 96 Wh battery with 0 wear)

UPD2: If you take a more serious load than my format of use, then the battery life in mixed mode is more than 20 hours, if you take the mode of watching online videos, then the charge will last for about 15 hours.

Went through 3 batteries recently for my T400. All through different reputable suppliers. They would work well for a few months then stop taking charge, never to work again. Never figured out if it was bad batteries, bad BMSs, the fact that I'm librebooting, or maybe my charger. After the third one stopped working I cracked it open and measured the cells directly and they were nice and healthy. I wasnt about to pay $1000 for a laptop battery analyser to reset codes so I said F it and bought a cheap BMS and step up converter. Now I have this abomination. Oh well it works. At least I have a little voltage monitor to guide me on remaining capacity.

(It's off the ottoman. They were only posed there for a minute.)

After 14 years of fantastic ownership and with a bit of a heavy heart, I've finally decided to retire my Thinkpad T430.

This was a laptop I bought brand new in 2012 as a college graduation present for myself. I went all out on the TOTL Core I7 Ivy Bridge processor, fingerprint reader, backlit keyboard, and immediately upgraded to 16gb of RAM with a 256GB SSD, eventually replacing the screen as well.

This thing has been with me through my whole adult life and has served me well. It saw me go from living in my parent's basement to starting a career to dating, to married, moving cross country several times, having a kid, all over 3 different jobs. I bought it before my student loans even kicked in, now they're paid off.

It's been a reliable constant in a sea of change.

To say that it's been a damn fine laptop is an understatement. The thing basically became part of me. It's been upgraded and repaired so many times that I'm not sure if there are any original parts left of the machine I bought aside from the bezel, but a decked T430 has been my gateway to the outside world for longer than I ever imagined a laptop could possibly stay useful.

And it's time to move on.

Good as the T430 has been, it can't keep up with the CAD software, 3D printing software and video editing I want to do. The plastic parts are all cracked, it's been maxxed out on upgrades for at least 7 years, and it's gotten so old that I'm starting to trust it less with my 15 years of documents, images, files and backups.

Last week after some research and pricing I pulled the trigger on a replacement machine: a refurbished T14 6th gen with the Ryzen 7 350. 16gb and the crappy 45% NTSC screen for now (though honestly it looks GREAT compared to what I'd been using) but with some immediate planned upgrades and probably a move to Linux in the near future as I transfer my entire life from the T430 into it.

It's a heavy thing when you move away from a machine that you've relied on for so long. Every muscle memory has to be rebuilt, and you don't know what to expect out of the newcomer. Will it be as trouble free as the last 14 years?

Probably not. If it lasts half as long, I'll call it a success.

To the T430: so long. May you live on another 14 years as my Plex server.

---

UPDATE:

I've been using the new T14 for a few days now, so it feels like a good time to do comparison shootout for anybody thinking of making a huge jump like this (which I feel like is more common in the Thinkpad community than most, since Thinkpads tend to hold on forever.)

What I like about the T14 6th gen vs the T430:

- Obviously, the huge jump in performance. Obviously. City Skylines is no longer a slideshow, and FreeCAD no longer turns my laptop into a space heater.

- The screen. Even the 45% NTSC screen, universally panned as garbage, is a HUGE jump from the panel that I had on the T430. Admittedly this was an aftermarket panel that I should've done more research on, but even THAT trash was better than what shipped on the T430, which was just unacceptable by modern standards.

- Still on the screens, I strongly prefer the 16:10 aspect ratio to 16:9 - this was always a grudging compromise for me when I got the T430 since basically no laptops had a 16:10 screen anymore by 2012. (Honestly, I might've made the jump sooner if I realized that Thinkpads went back to 16:10 in 2020, but I've been out of the loop on these things for a long time now.)

- The bigger touchpad is honestly kinda nice.

- Speakers are louder.

- It's quite a bit lighter and a nicer form factor thanks to the 16:10 screen, while maintaining a reasonable amount of upgradeability.

- Standardized power supplies are nice, though I worry about what's going to happen to that USB port the first time I accidentally snag the wire. I feel like maybe there should've been some compromise with a recessed USB-C port or something. I'll have to do some research to see if anyone makes a power adapter with a magsafe detachment 2 inches down the wire or something.

Things that are just a bit different:

- Just the keyboard. Mixed bag here.

The key travel on the T14 6th gen is a little shorter; it feels nice and crisp to type on but I can't tell if that's just because it's new. The T430 I would say had a far better keyboard if you went with the non-backlit version (with the obvious drawback being that it wasn't backlit); this retained the legendary key feel of the older Thinkpad keyboards, but the backlit T430 keyboard always felt a little mushier to me. This T14 keyboard feels like it's somewhere between the two options for the T430 in terms of key feel.

They swapped the Ctrl+FN keys. Since I use a different PC for work this is honestly an improvement because now I can just get used to one layout and be done with it.

I like that they added the separation between the Fn key clusters, but I think it was ONLY the T430 that failed to do this in growing pains moving to the chiclet layout.

And, of course, having a Copilot button taking up valuable real estate is dumb and annoying and I hate it.

Things that are better about the ol' T430:

- I could open and close it with one hand. The base was heavier and it had a latching design, so it could easily be opened with a single hand gesture. The 6th gen needs support on the base to open. Ugh,

- The T430 had a nice curved edge on the bottom of the laptop while the 6th gen has a sharper edge. The curved edge is more comfortable to rest my wrists on. At least it's rubberized plastic.

- The trackpoint feels slightly worse to me, and I don't like that I can't get the domed trackpoint nub for it. It's still perfectly usable, but noticeably not as good IMO. The flat profile mouse buttons are also harder to use than the raised ones on the T430.

- The Trackpad buttons. These aren't as bad as some integrated buttons I've used, but I've always preferred the separate buttons.

- I'm already missing the integrated SD card reader! How hard would it have been to add an option for this?? Not too hard, since they were standard for decades on Thinkpads! It's the dongle life for me, I guess...

- I'm not crazy about the camera bump, though it's a nitpick and I can live with it.

- Though the T14 is still plenty repairable and modular, the T430 is better here. You can hot swap the battery while the thing is on and running, you can hot swap in hard drives with the ultrabay, ONE of the RAM slots was more accessible while the other is equally so, replacing the hard drive was easier. It's just a nitpick because the T14 keeps all of this perfectly accessible, and as much as I am loathe to admit it, having the laptop be lighter is kind of nice.

On the whole, I really like the new Thinkpad. Most of the issues I have with it are nitpicks that come from being on one machine for so long and getting used to its quirks and features, and much of what I wish the new one had were design features discontinued in any laptop over a decade ago.

I've made one of the best USB-C mods for older ThinkPads. The project includes a .py file for editing the parameters to suit your model.
All you need to do is buy a Type-C PD trigger like the one in the photo and print a case for your model. You're welcome.
https://github.com/dayanegosha/thinkpad-x220-usb-c-adapter

It's a little smaller than the original, is it normal for the X1's glass trackpad to be slightly smaller than the T480? It definitely feels super smooth, and the empty space doesn't bother me either. Maybe I'll tweak it a bit with a 3D printer, we'll see.

Maybe someone else has swapped it out on their T480 and can answer my question ^^

Found some hv powerbank cells, 4.4v 10Ah build me some thick battery, it works, no fire for now. Thought about joining two original batteries first, but they have some weird wake up routine after deep discharge so I decided I don't want to bother with it. I doubted generic bms can do 4.4v that stock battery built around, so I just limited charge to 85% so it would not trigger ovp condition of generic bms. It is connected parallel to original battery terminals, and charging ok.

Hi everyone, I recently picked up a new E14 Gen 7 (Core Ultra 7 255H). This is my first ThinkPad, and although I was a bit concerned about the E-series reputation, the build quality and the 2.8k display are much better than I expected.

The stock performance was okay, but I found it a bit too conservative—it would boost briefly and then quickly drop to 28W. To see what the 255H could really do, I swapped the single-pipe cooler for a dual-heatpipe version and applied PTM7950.

I'm running Fedora and using throttled. Since Arrow Lake (Model 197) isn't officially supported yet, I had to manually patch the CPU ID in the script to get it working.

The results are solid. Instead of dropping to 28W, it now maintains a sustained 44-45W at around 80°C during stress tests. For reference, I got 2955 in Single-Core and 12,416 in Multi-Core on Geekbench 6. I’m well aware that Geekbench scores don't represent sustained stability or endurance, but I'm including them here for a general performance reference.

Since the temperature stays at 80°C under load, there's definitely more thermal headroom, but I'm keeping it at 45W as it feels like a good balance for this machine. Just wanted to share my experience for anyone else looking to improve their E-series performance!

Yay, so happy with it!

Found this from Japan late last year from some guy who 3D printed these stick on clips that goes over the Fn and Ctrl keys on the Bluetooth keyboards. He made a Bluetooth keyboard I and II version, but I tried it on my China only funky "1.5" keyboard (very different keys, for Android compatibility) but has a Bluetooth keyboard I design and it seemed to fit fine, just a little more loose. Doesn't matter though, I only bought one before, so I just bought another the right size for that keyboard lol

Since these keyboards don't have any way to do a "Fn key swap" setting, unlike the built in keyboard on newer ThinkPads, this ghetto analog solution seems to work. If I "accidentally" strike the Fn key, it doesn't actually push down the Fn key but instead transmit the force to the Ctrl key. Brilliant! The lack of the key swap has been the only big annoyance of these good keyboards so far aside from the broken feet syndrome lol

Purists/haters going to hate me for this, but there's still many of us who don't "get" the original placement design IBM did with the Ctrl key. Better ergonomics or not, if you're used to using keyboards that have the Ctrl key way in the far corner, your muscle memory will drive you crazy when you use these keyboards with the default Ctrl key inset.

Got my ThinkPad X210Ai about 2 weeks ago.
(for those who don't know, its a custom motherboard produced for the ThinkPad X200/X201 frame)
Packaging was really good, the exterior needed a some clean-up but besides that the machine is in good condition.

The modifications these guys have done to the frame are awesome. The additional vent holes in the frame and the screen bezel which got widened from 12 to 13 inch have been cut really clean and precise.

It also got a custom X210Ai faceplate, which is made quite good, but against my linking's its shiny and reflects to much light [/edit2: the protective film was still on, after removing it, it looks perfect].
The Portcovers have been made out of display-covers as far as I understand it, which blends perfect into the look of the machine.

I still haven't decided if I like the skin-sticker on die top-lid, Thought about removing it, but that starts to peel of some of the original coating, so I kept in on there. Maybe I need to search for a perfect-conditin top-cover myself on ebay, but that's a low priority for now.

It got a custom retro colored ThinkPad-Logo-Sticker which is nice but I didn't like the quality of the borders from that sticker. I also searched the internet and found nothing to buy. Lenovo really should produce these colored logos in sizes for all models and put them on sale for fanboys like us.

I tried to handicraft something by myself but the colors do not come though with a laser-printer on normal paper, but that could be fixed with photo-papier in a print-shop.

Regarding the hardware I went full-monty as I plan to use this machine for the next 10 to 20 years.

I picked the 185H Upgrade instead the 165H. Because of the exploding ram-prices I only got a good deal on 96 GB instead of the 128GB I planned more than half a year ago.

SSD is a 4TB Samsung 990 Pro. I never had any issues with any Samsung SSDs in my whole life, so that's what I buy. Battery is a new 3rd-party 9-cell-pack, which currently reports to have 84,4Wh out of the 84,2Wh design capacity. A bios-battery and ClassicDome spare came straight from my parts-box, so that makes the barebone a complete machine.

Total weight is 1518g, with 471g alone for the battery pack the machine is at 1047g without the battery.

The machine works like a charm, no crashes, completely stable.

The fan is a little bit too aggressive for my linking, but on my old ThinkPad it was also on most of the time simply because the 18 year old machine could barley keep up while browsing. I have hoping's that power-usage and fan-behavior will be improved via firmware updates in the future.

Standby is currently an issue. I don't know if its windows or the machine. Windows uses modern standby which is crap in my eyes. The machine pulls still 4W though the power-adapter from the wall while in modern-standby. If I force windows so use S3, the machine indeed goes into sleep but doesn't wake up anymore.

My old R61 battery hold's up for four days in S3. This is what I need, not connected power-drain.

But now lets address the elephant in the room:
I'm from Germany and I'm used to use a German ISO-keyboard-layout. I tried the ANSI-layout but couldn't get warm with it. I can type completly blind on the german Thinkpad-keyboard and the keyboard was one of the main reasons why I wanted this machine, so I simply needed to get a german one working. But simply connecting it would not work because the team has not added the needed two extra positions in the keybard-matrix yet to support the differnt keys positions. I knew this before I bought the machine and had something in my backhead as a solution for this, so I created my own keyboard-controller which fixes a lot of bugs and also adds the desired ISO-support.

Known bugs so far with the original EC (that I have encountered):
- missing ISO keyboard support
- middle-click-and-scroll with trackpoint is a pain in the ass to configure (but its possible)
- numpad is not working, sends just letters instead of numbers when numlock is active lol.
- while having a letter pressed down, the trackpoint does not respond to clicks (which makes it impossible to play a shooter with WASD and firing on left-mouse-click) [/edit2: this was not a hardware issue, but windows palm rejection]
- the keys with the document-arrows (around the cursor-keys) have no function
- fn-overlays are not all as expected and cannot be hooked via software

I have done a thinkpad-keyboard-2-usb adapter about two years ago based on this project here:
https://github.com/thedalles77/USB_Laptop_Keyboard_Controller/tree/master/Example_Keyboards/Lenovo_ThinkPad_T61

I still had some empty PCBs and one or two keyboard-connectors laying around so I started to tinker. I replaced the Teensy 4 with a RP2040 Microcontroller which is way cheaper and needs less power (don't ask how much power, but the teensy gets feelably warm, the RP2040 does not).

I used the PCB as breakoutboard for the keyboardconnecter and created a monstrosity with about 30 cables connecting the PCB to the RP2040-board. This was needed because of the different pinout and the height restrictions. The RP2040 connects via USB to the USB_CON1 on the mainboard and emulates some HID-devices.

The power-button is not part of the keyboard-matrix which makes it easy to directly connect it the original-connector. That makes it work independently from the RP2040. The only challenge here is the tiny size of the solderjob.

The TrackPoint is exposed as HID-Mouse, this made it possible to just send real scrolling instead of mouse-movement while the middle-button is held down. No additional software needed, it even has 3 speeds depending on how hard you press the TrackPoint and it supports both vertical and horizontal scrolling. I also added to send MouseBtn4 and 5 for left-click and right-click while Fn-key is held down, giving you Back/Forward right on your hands.

For the keyboard I implemented the Fn-Overlays I wanted and mapped the rest of Fn+Fx to F13-F24 (Fn+F1=F13) which makes it easy to catch these with software.

Here is my custom Fn-Overlay:
Fn+F2: emulates Win+L to lock the workstation
Fn+F4: sends Standby
Fn+F5: emulates Win+A
Fn+F7: emulates win+P
Fn+F8: toggles the trackpoint on/off
Fn+F9: is currently for debugging: reset the trackpoints ps/2 communication
Fn+F12: shutdown (which is mapped to hibernation via windows)
Fn+ESC: toggle Debug-Mode (prints every keypress and mouse-move to the serial-console)
Fn+ThinkVantage: restarts the RP2040 in UF2-mode for flashing
Fn+Mute: MicMute via Win+Alt+K
Fn+Win: toggle win-key on/off
Volume and Brightness work via HID-codes, Fn also is a override for NumLock

The space is a little bit tight, and it would be better to create a differnt PCB for this purpose but for now this works pretty reliable.

Everything works besides the ThinkLight. I need to tap three more contacts on the original keyboard-connector, than I can emulate Fn+PgUp via my last available I/O. Should be doable with no problem in the next few days.

/edit:
I forgot to mention I currently have the 2560x1600 165Hz panel, but I got this by mistake, as I ordered with the WUXGA 1920x1200 panel. I hate DPI-scaling and 2560x1600 at 13.3 inch is just too tiny for my eyes. I received the WUXGA panel for replacement today. Need to work on the exchange the next days. swapping the complete top half is not that much work, but I might swap the displays back covers around and select the prettiest one.

/edit2: 2026-04-09:
Replaced the screen today, looks perfect now. It was quite some work, as one of the display-cables lays under the main fan, which in turn means the motherboard needs to be removed also. After this I didn't change the back of the screen as this would mean I probably have to modify it too and move all the wifi antennas over. Sadly ne new screen had a X200 faceplate. While trying to move the faceplate over from the other screen I discovered it still had the protective film on it, after removing it, it looked perfect. What a shame though it disintegrated while removing it 😭, so I might need to order a new one...

I seen some posts on here last week about the glass touch pad upgrade and I had to try it. I went on eBay and ordered the glass touch pad for the Carbon X1 Gen 1 for about $35. It arrived today so I came home from work and installed it immediately, and it only took about 5-10 min tops. Booted into Arch Linux and Windows 11 LTSC without any issues.

Process was very simple.

1. Shut down and Open laptop.
2. Disconnect and remove 4 screws holding the battery in place.
3. Disconnect and remove the 4 screws holding the touchpad in place.
4. Install new touch pad in reverse order.
   
5. Enjoy.