ThinkPad (and Toughbook) thread

Whenever I get a laptop I usally do:

never done anything to my x220. been using it for many years now sometimes even outside

And now my very first ThinkPad is officially on the way. Excited to get one and see what all the hype is about! I decided to grab a T400.

honest question: what's the downside to running Windows if you never connect to the internet and just use it to run old games?

They're pretty nice.

Yep, what he said. Isopropyl will clean more shit than you could see was on it in the first place.

Toothbrush to clean the fan (or buy a replacement online, just don't get shit ones from AliExpress). Compressed air can to blow out the heatsink(s). Replacement keyboard if the old one was too far gone.

WiFi card can often also be replaced with a much better (and more power efficient!) one if whitelist is removed.

What are the go-to thinkpads nowadays?
All I can find are guides from 2014~2017. Is it still the same?
What I want to do is go to college, be able to browse the web normally and not emulate Excel through Wine.

Tenko with a Tenkopad!

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What would be a nice distro/de for a x230 nowadays?
If I'm going to use nothing but an SSD, is it ok to run on 4GB without a swap partition or should I get another 4gb stick instead?
The one I want to buy has an i5-3320M and probably hd graphics 3000.

If the whitelist is removed, what would be the best wifi card that is the most power effiecient to install that is also completely FOSS if I use linux?

...

I love you please keep doing what you do

The T400 finally arrived and gotta say, it is actually quite nice :) Now to install Gentoo onto it! Should be a fun evening!

she watches

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What are those metal prongs supposed to do?
In my x200 I just bought they aren't there, but a dark grey fabric that caught a lot of crud over time.

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UltraBase mounting points.

Did I do pretty good?

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Assuming it's in good condition and you didn't pay much more than $20 for shipping, yes, that's a good deal.

My local computer dude says the E6440 is total shit compared to the E6430, not sure how much of that is true though.

Can confirm however that the M6700 is total shit compared to the M6500.

AFAIK there are no completely FOSS wireless cards (firmware? not sure) but Atheros cards are generally the recommended "free" ones to go for.

I have both and that's wrong. Especially since the e6440 has a 1080p IPS option. The e6430 does feel a bit more sturdy and has that modular bay thing, though.

Atheros cards that use the ath9k driver are completely free

What is the lowest-idle-power Thinkpad for under $75? X131?

Don't use isopropyl on screens. Most glossy screens and some matte screens have a violet anti-glare/moisutre coat which comes off with alcohol. Not that it's still there but don't do that on new stuff.
Use flashlight on the bottom of the fan to see if there's chunks of dust on the exit vent. I don't recommend opening them up since it kills the keyboard.

Older games work fine in wine nowadays. You need to install them in wine though, not just run the executable from a windows partition. Also there is playonlinux but that never ever works like it should.

What machine would be best suited to play games from the Xbox 360 era and earlier without costing a bomb?

Using a cheap airbrush to blow dust around is fun as hell. Really makes the fans whiz

What's a good daily driver ThickPad and is the Ultra base a meme?

Should've bought the Dell Longitude

T500 with a QuadCore modded in and a second battery instead of the DVD player.

Mostly a meme. There are no good desktop replacement laptops. When you are at your desk you should have a proper Desktop PC. Thus I don't see the value of an ultra base.

alright thanks. wont go for the ultra base thing then

Bump and attention seeking

I've heard that can do damage - fan generates voltages higher than spec (because the compressed air spins it faster than it normally goes) which can affect sensitive components.

Never seen it happen, sounds reasonable but *shrug*.

I just bought my first thinkpad. It's an X200t. I got it for quite cheap as well.

Got an A485 and it's fucking great. Thought I was the only person with a Ryzen thinkpad.

Not mine though, I bought it for a family member who needed a good laptop.

Unrelated, but holy shit Ryzen is black magic, pic related is my 2600 with a AIO cooler in a rather cool room. Even with fucked up P-States it runs ice cold.

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One of the last 16:10 ThinkPads. Flash libreboot on it if you're a freetard or enjoy it as-is.

Eh. Mine runs pretty hot usually, but I can't control that low power mode thing that from linux, so I don't know if that'd help. Also, it's a laptop so cooling is finnicky.

an xbox 360 can be had for the price of an actually shitty old chinkpad on ebay

I found this little beauty browsing the KDE Products section:
slimbook.es/en/store/slimbook-eclipse-15/eclipse-intel-i7hq-comprar

Unfortunately, it went the Amazon route and forces you to make an account to buy anything...

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I just ordered a T420. Its the latest model that came with the legendary 7-row keyboard layout, just before the chicklet keyboard came out. The T430 with the chicklet keyboard can apparently accept a T420 keyboard, and it can use a slightly later CPU. The T420/430 have socketed CPU so you can upgrade it.

The X220 and X230 are like the T420 and T430 respectively, except they are thinner (having slightly less IO but it's still good) and the stuff about the keyboards applies to them too. The CPU is soldered in the X series though.

The later thinkpads got thinner and lighter and the keyboard layout is not gonna give you the "real" thinkpad experience, but even their modern chicklet key switches have enough travel to receiving praise from people who come from non-thinkpad lines, especially former macbook peasants.

Forgot to mention that if you are using wine to run excel instead of just installing open office or libre office to do that then you are just a fucking brainlet.

Ask a friend to buy it.

There's a Precision M70 on eBay Kleinanziegen for €25, needs a new keyboard though. Do it?

Also went ahead and bought a new caddy for my 19 so I can fuck around with Loonix.

Seller doesn't want to ship internationally, oh well.

Oh hey, look what I just bought. a C840, and not just any C840, it's one with the UltraSharp UXGA screen!

Which basically means it's a Precision M50 without the Quadro. Let's hope the chassis or backlight isn't fucked up on this one.

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I'm sorry Zig Forums, I had to do it. Now, what to replace Windows 10 with?

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Win Me would be a good choice

Ubuntu. Easy setup. It's nice.
Have it running in my toughbook.

Anybody here set up a dock for their toughbook? I'm thinking of getting one of these things and setting up an antenna.

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I need input if anyone would like to share theirs and I apologize in advance if this is not the right place to ask. So my main laptop is a T500. It's maxed with the CPU and RAM and it still performs amazingly for my needs, but I want something a little more powerful. I figure I could use my T500 for another 4 years, but I would rather upgrade now.

Ideally I want something with a 16:10 screen ratio that still has the non-chicklet keyboard. I was looking through Thinkpads and I believe the latest model would be the T410. The screen would be a downgrade in resolution but I can take that, and 8GB of RAM is still plenty for me. Is there a model I am overlooking that has what I want, be it stock or through a mod? I believe the T430 can be fitted to use the classic keyboard, but it has a 16:9 screen. Any recommendations?

M6400 Covet Edition for 170€, go for it?

Windows ME fucked me over so many times that I lost count.

I'll give it a try, last time I used Ubuntu was version 8.04 or something.

Give it a try. For me, it's one of those OS' that are so easy to use, that, coming from windows my entire life, it's actually TOO easy. Some problems like my touchscreen for example were solved by simply configuring my BIOS options, nothing else but calibrating the thing after via a download. And I was going through hell trying to find an answer on the ubuntu guide pages, for nothing. My wacom tablet it picked up without drivers, my mobile broadband it picked up after simply switching over to a different wwan card. I mean it basically chews shit up and spits it out for you without the bloat and bs windows makes you go through. Some things ARE a bit difficult to config, specifically terminal based commands, but I'm still learning. Overall, I'm highly impressed with it as an alternative to windows. Latest version is 18.10.

I've found that Ubuntu won't work on my machine. Elementary won't work either.

Some guy recommended Pop!_OS. I'm out of time for now and have to suffer Windows 10 for a little longer before I have a day to fiddle with this again.

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One of my complaints with Ubuntu is the brightness and sound sliders, they just don't work for me. Most likely way to configure that, but I dunno yet. So I downloaded a program to do the brightness tweaking, the sound is simply shit as of now. Some things really are a bit harder to config, but ya know, overall, I'm happy with it. Never used Elementary, or Pop!_OS.

adding: you can however hear sound via earphones right away, which is good.

X230 coming in the mail.
Still haven't decided a DE or distro.
Any recommendations?
How much of a chore is it to avoid systemd in the current year?
I gave my main desktop up for systemd when I got my ryzen, couldn't find a reliable distro out there that had a recent kernel without systemd.

DE is more of a case of what not to use, namely GNOME 3 because it's homo. I prefer Xfce but whatever floats your boat I suppose.
I like Debian and Devuan. Always easy to get up and running, just remember to enable non-free repos if you have Intel WiFi and get your firmware.
Devuan is pretty legit, there is some fuckery here and there because of the systemd divorce if you want to use unstable or testing but it is pretty good on stable. There are a few Arch derivatives that also use OpenRC like Parabola, and it's pretty simple to migrate a Debian or Arch install to another init. Try out Devuan.

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The only OS's I will use are Slackware Linux or OpenBSD. Either of those would work find on your X230.

yes i want that

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700 series ThinkPads are a e s t h e t i c as fuck, especially with the Dock II under it.

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it looks like the laptop is on a desktop computer. they used to look like that years ago and people would put them under their crt monitor

You know what's also aesthetic as fuck? Ex-NATO Dell Latitudes.

Yep, I got my C840 in the mail, it apparently came from a NATO facility and was not allowed to process classified information, judging from a red sticker on the FDD which says "NATO UNCLASSIFIED"

Yeah except nato is fucking gay.

Holy shit, so Quadro softmods are also a thing for mobile GeForce cards! I installed the GeForce4 from the C840 into the battered M50 chassis, installed Rivatuner and flipped the PCI ID switch to Quadro, and boom, it now identifies as a Quadro4 500 Go GL.

Only 32MB VRAM but still, back in 2002 a C840 would be far, far cheaper than a M50.

That's not a dock, that's a whole fucking PC it looks like.
Apparently not though.
thinkwiki.org/wiki/ThinkPad_Dock_II

He is mistaken, that is the Selectadock (I, II, or III)

youtube.com/watch?v=DGHcX0YTPKw
thinkwiki.org/wiki/SelectaDock_III

Really feels good when you buy shit that used to be worth thousands of dollars for what is practically pocket change. I know it isn't functionally worth anything anymore, but it gives me this weird fuzzy feeling.

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Only to retards who think PC = Windows and run bloatware. I'm looking at the specs on ThinkWiki and it doesn't look terribly bad at all. I was using a Pentium 4 until 2016. It ran just fine except for a few things

You'd think it'd be like that but you can't just pop Debian or something on it. Tons of programs simply won't work on a Pentium II because of lack of instruction sets from this century. It's basically a glorified 7-pound typewriter now. But I will take it to class and use it unironically when I get a hard drive, just to be an autisté.

Anyone got an e585 with Linux running stable? I've put Mint 19.1 with kernel 5.0 on it, I still have to use it for a longer time to test it.

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I've got an a485 (ryzen 5 2500u w/ vega) and it randomly freezes about once a day during use. There's also some graphical glitches when waking the computer up from suspend (happens on windows as well), probably related to the graphics drivers, and of course the fingerprint reader doesn't work.
Oh, also the latest TLP can't set the battery thresholds properly so you need the development git version.
And when using ALSA without pulseaudio, I can't have two different applications play things at once. I haven't tried pulseaudio yet.
Haven't tested the camera yet but mic works, also don't use WWAN, as I've inserted an SSD in that M.2 slot.

I know it's not the same laptop but it's probably similar enough in terms of hardware. Just don't bother running a kernel version older than 4.18. While some things work, Xorg definitely won't. This means a lot of livecds won't work.

What anime is that?

SauceNao says Hinato Note.

Is GPU failure on the T4x series a forgone conclusion? I really like my T42p, but I'm considering just getting rid of it before it inevitably croaks

mx linux

Thank you, I'll be sure to add that to my list of distros to test on my OS installation weekend.

Enjoy your mitigations lmao

Beware of buying thinkpads over ebay or some amazon.
They can have modified firmware or even be bugged with TRAC and other invisible and independent DMA chip backdoors. Even if the seller is trustable, the time gap between these devices being shipped is all they'll ever need to implant these botwares.
So I heard your order got canceled again or was out of the time frame, well now you know.

Unless you're a enemy of the state or are involved in the CP trade, you don't have to be this paranoid. the CIAniggers aren't going after some autist's ThinkPad.

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We're all a bunch of Gene Hackmans and CIAwillsmiths up in here. Literally everybody surfing image boards is an enemy of the state in the sense that we aren't obviously and completely under the sole influence of those who control mass media. Most of us aren't up to anything subversive, but we're not 100% nullified zogbots, either.

The cycle appears to be: people learn that laws and social cohesion are helpful -> these people succeed -> a bunch of subversive, sociopathic assholes (jews, minorities in general, traitors) take control.

We are in the third stage. Freedom is terrorism. Pointing out hypocrisy and illogical policy is evil. Truth is dead and crowdspeak is God. Follow the unreasonable demands of the idiotic, ever browning masses to our mutual doom and third world status or you're a bigot.

Fuck clownworld.

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modern thinkpads have built in botnet tho. its an addon thats somewhere in the bios that breaks it if a remote server says that it should do so

Still has ghosting like a motherrfucker but quite impressive nonetheless.

Always double-check

15 sec boot time

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What are you doing there, user?
And by any chance, do you know how I can unlock a wwan card to make it run from any tower, anywhere?...

Now what do I do?

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eBay?...

My first attempt to libreboot my x200. Took out the wrong chip.

Nope. x200 doesn't seem to be locked, don't know what wwan module you have. forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-X-Series-Laptops/X220-WWAN-Locked-to-Vodafone-How-to-unlock/td-p/879123

Weird, I bought an X200 to install Libreboot as well. Which picture is the wrong chip? Also, did you get the wiring schematic on the Libreboot website? I didn't really understand it.