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Comment by japhyr | Hacker News Reader

I have a thinkpad t430s that I love. I got an ssd, and traded the DVD drive for a bay battery. I run ubuntu 12.04, and the only issue I have is that sleep stops working every 10-20 days. I restart it about that often anyways, so I haven't even tried to diagnose the issue.

I had read complaints about the screen, but I do mostly web development and I like the screen as well as any other laptop I've had. I am not a gamer at all, if that affects people's evaluation of screen quality. I like the trackpad just fine, and don't have any issues with the keypad.

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It's referred to as 'sleep of death', my debian-running x230 also has it. Do you at least know what 'layer' of the system can be attributed to causing this? I haven't spend much time researching this myself either.

I'm also interested in knowing how did you trade the DVD for a bay battery. What are the specs (RAM, Proc, HDD, SSD, etc)? how much did you pay for it? EDIT: Asking more questions.

I paid about $900-$1000 altogether. I ordered the cheapest ram and hdd from lenovo. I ordered 8GB of ram from crucial, a 128GB ssd from crucial, and a bay battery from amazon.

I have not maxed this out at all. I think I will be happy with it for a couple more years.

My worry about the T series is that its a bit of a heavy machine to lug around.

How did you swap out the DVD for a battery? Did you buy it like that from Lenovo?

I too have a T430, and love it. Can't imagine that a lighter laptop would be able to achieve 8-9 hours(largest battery 9 cell i think) in a text editor with a 14 inch screen. I also swapped out the HDD for an SSD and removed the DVD and put the HDD in it(they make special caddies for HDD in DVD drive) which I take out sometimes because I like to thow my laptop around and dont want to worry about breaking the HDD. Myne was $820 from lenovo. Edit: also runs Linux Mint like a champ, all hot keys keys(FN) work, but I too get the problem with putting my computer in sleep mode for more then a month.

I'm running an old Viao X that gets 10-12 hours on the big battery and weighs in at a couple of lbs. Running ubuntu, but the processor is too slow for me to recommend today.

I ordered it with the stock DVD in. I think I ordered the bay battery from amazon. I'll check when I get home. It was an easy swap.

If you haven't heard this advice, I highly suggest you order the cheapest configuration you can from lenovo. Then order memory from crucial or newegg. You can save upwards of $100 over upgrading with lenovo.

I like the t430s form factor much better than my wife's MacBook Pro.

I believe this is the battery I ordered from amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-ThinkPad-Ultrabay-Battery-0A363...

It's about $25 more expensive directly from Lenovo:

http://shop.lenovo.com/SEUILibrary/controller/e/web/LenovoPo...

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