I bought a 'new' ThinkPad
spell.mywire.org:1960/~stack/0252.gmi
Jan 01 · 4 months ago · 👍 drh3xx, k8quinn, Homer, sam, bsj38381, poemas_infieles · 🎉 1
6 Comments ↓
ThinkPads are great. I used a T400 for a long time but upgraded to an Lenovo-refurbished A485 (AMD equivalent to T480) to get a higher-resolution screen and NVMe support. I've still got the T400 (which my daughter used for a while), Win7 and all.
For the record, I use Debian Linux on the 485 from an NVMe disk in the WAN slot and have the Win10 it came with though on a SATA III SSD. That slot can be upgraded to an NVMe slot, I just haven't needed to do that (yet).
🚀 stack [OP] · Jan 02 at 18:12:
Interesting. I thought 480-period machines have an M2 NVME slots. My 470 had an old-school 2.5" bay, so I bought an M2 caddy/adapter.
Xubuntu works out-of-the box on these machines. I think there was some minor issue with sleeping/waking (and occasionally it still does not wake; I suspect it actually does but the screen needs to be reset. Someday I will figure it out). But I hear all laptops have some waking issues!
🚀 stack [OP] · Jan 02 at 18:15:
Now Jan 12 delivery.
It's amazing how UPS artificially slows down some packages. The distance here is maybe 300 miles.
💎 Vindemiatrix · Jan 05 at 16:01:
I have too many, and by that I mean not enough! I had a bad experience buying a “used - like new” Thinkpad off eBay so definitely use caution. Some thinkpads support Libreboot and Coreboot, or even the tin-foil hat “Heads” coreboot distro which is always fun but way too paranoid for my actual use case. There’s nothing quite like browsing Geminispace on a librebooted Thinkpad running the Trisquel GNU/Linux-libre. It’s like “man, I wish people used computers like this instead of systems designed to exploit them.”
🚀 stack [OP] · Jan 05 at 18:39:
@Vindemiatrix - curious to hear about your bad experience on EBay...
I haven't had any really bad experiences, and take the descriptions with a grain of salt. Up to and including -- if it's a total dud, so I blow $150 and have some spare parts (and I will by an 11-gen i5 machine next time). My digital repair skills are above-average, so I am hopeful.
🚀 stack [OP] · Jan 08 at 01:47:
I just got it, and I am happy to report, it is flawless, clean and works like a charm. The battery shows 15 charge cycles and should last over 10 hours on a charge.
The screen is perfect - 1920x1080 and looks really good. I was worried it would come with a cheapo screen.
It is now marginally the fastest machine I own.