Used ThinkPad Buyer's Guide
ktgee.net
ktgee.net
Lenovo's batteries really suck. They lose life a lot quicker than Apple's batteries and are very expensive to replace, especially since the primary and optibay batteries tend to die around the same time. At least they're user replaceable.
I'm a fan of Dell's laptops lately. Many newer Dell laptops have good Linux support. Oddly, I think Dell Alienware laptops are great as portable workstation laptops because they're powerful and can stay cool, but YMMV.
I've been buying higher-end Dells for a while. If you get something based on an Intel chipset, Linux support is generally quite solid, even if it isn't explicitly claimed. Based on my experience with my last three laptops and what I hear from everyone else, I often think there's really two Dells, the "cheap at all costs" consumer end and the business/"prosumer" end that makes, if not gear that gets as much love as old-school IBM, perfectly serviceable stuff. I'm typing this on an at-least-three-year-old Studio 17, and it barely even shows wear. Battery's croaking, of course, but that's hardly Dell's fault (and it's not like it instantly died or anything). Also the fact you can get full service manuals is really nice... even if you're comfortable with hardware, trying to blunder your way through dissassembling a modern laptop if you need to, say, clean out the fan, is no fun.
Swap in an SSD and max out the RAM and they're awesome linux workhorses.
Any tips on how you've gone about finding said corporate liquidators?
When you install Windows drivers, Thinkpads say something about Lenovo Japan, while others (like Ideapads) say Lenovo Shenzhen. HP Elitebooks are well made while consumer HPs are really poorly designed/constructed.
The downside is they're rather expensive. But I'd rather pay for something that works than for something that does not.
Lenovo even had a blogpost where they claimed "most users adapt" in a short amount of time. Not that there was any benefit, just that they needed to modernize the design and it wasn't that harmful. Idiots.
The X201t is like the pinnacle of their design. 16:10 screen (important if you use Windows, especially inside a RDP app - 1366x786 just doesn't have enough vertical pixels).
The X201 also had a FULL keyboard. They used every cm of the laptop to fit all the keys in. The newer X series 12", they remove keys, and added blank space around the keyboard. Here they are trynna cram stuff in, and they literally throw away 2-3 keys worth of space.
Lenovo is just beyond incompetent in designing things at this point. I don't know about the sales side, but since everyone else in this space is just as bad, it probably doesn't harm them. But if Dell ever wakes up and says "oh, hey, maybe we should make real laptops", they'd steal away ThinkPad's marketshare pretty quickly.
Oh and just to insult us on top of all these bad changes, they ship utterly crap panels with some of the laptops. I bought a T440p last year, and I absolutely hate it. It has a viewing angle of 0 - there's no point at which you can view it and get anything remotely decent.
1: I've tried MacBooks... the ergonomics are terrible, as is the heat. Beautiful displays though.
Very sad, given that IBM ThinkPad and later Lenovo ThinkPad up to T420/X220 where very good robust devices and had a great build quality including a good keyboard and screen. I would pay premium price for a T420 series notebook with a brand new Intel i7 chipset that support 16+ GB RAM (or the T60p series style with a 4:3 display).
Luckily replacement screen parts are quite affordable these days. And before anyone complains, I do use all this memory, currently dom0 has 4GB free.
And it's not even crammed in, the X201 keyboard is identical in size and layout to the T400 keyboard.
Every recent laptop I've tried with a clicky trackpad has been absolute crap. The texture will be too rough or too sticky, the click won't work half the time, the right-click is hopeless, some try to do clever things with multi-finger gestures which usually triggers the mfg-provided crapware launcher, and they're too small.
Apple got the clickpad pretty much perfect, except for when they get dirty or bent. Nothing else that I've used comes within a mile. Trackpads on laptops were not amazing, but usually workable before everyone went clickpad-crazy. Now, it seems like you have to hunt to find something with buttons so you can actually use it. I can't imagine that any of these are getting good feedback, yet it's been a trend for a few years now. PC mfgs make me sad.
I personally also prefer a traditional ThinkPad keyboard, trackpad and trackpoint (up to T420/X220 series).
I won't buy any notebook with these slim keys, that might look stylish and fashionable. I need a business notebook for work and IBM ThinkPad and early Lenovo ThinkPad were robust and very good at that.
The first manufacturer that learns from their recent mistakes, be it Lenovo/HP/Dell/etc, will be the winner.
But if it takes too long, maybe someone should start a kickstarter campaign and produce truly business notebooks without any compromises with a 1500-2500$ price tag. A traditional keyboard, trackpad, trackpoint, robust plastic frame, maybe even a 4:3 IPS screen (1600x1200 or higher).
As a general rule, physical buttons and total lack of multi-touch support seem to go hand-in-hand with good ol' quality... but even that is not a foolproof rule.
That being said, I will change it for a W541/T541 ultranav touchpad asap. But not sure if I will keep it. Getting used to the pinch-to-zoom.
Edit: as you can see with Macbooks, clickpads are not the problem. Drivers are the problem. With the right drivers [0], the T440s clickpad is very precise, clicking doesn't move the cursor, and scrolling is pixel-perfect.
[0] Try Fedora 22
Made working on it a bit surreal recently though until I figured out that he'd stuck the mouse in his pocket and was walking by in the hallway.
They removed the physical buttons older thinkpads had [1].
2015 Thinkpads (2015) for X (including x1 carbon), T and W have corrected numerous issues the last generation(s) had, including:
- Bringing back physical keys and the old-style trackpad!
- The "adaptive" function keys on the X1 carbon
- The merged insert key on X series
Lenovo took a bad bet, but give them credit, they fixed 2015 thinkpads.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jb7p3VkQCOo - Side-by-side comparison.
It seems all hope is lost with Lenovo ThinkPad. They simply don't understand what a keyboard layout means nor why it's important to group keys and create keys with different sizes. Also the slim keys are bad in many ways. The omission of the F-keys, the omission of the audio&mic-keys. ThinkPad was easy to open using just 2 screws. Replacing parts was easy. Forget that with their new consumer style T430+ series.
I personally give Lenovo one more chance for a "T460" in 2016, but I doubt it will resurface the T420 series style. I would support a kickstarter campaign that sole goal should be creating a premium business notebook "IBM ThinkPad style".
FYI, it's called a Trackpoint.
Wipe the default OS. Install your own. Problem solved.
I don't buy laptops for the software (I can deal with that), but for the hardware. Anyway most OEM installs are filled with crapware, it's faster to just wipe everything in the first place.
- re-installing Windows would void all warranties
- re-installing Windows would result in a non-working laptop because Lenovo drivers are not available anywhere
- I should under no circumstances re-install Windows because it would "break everything, because it's not Microsoft Windows on these laptops, it's Lenovo Windows".
So I guess the moral of this story is, if you have to call Lenovo and Mark answers the phone, hang up immediately and try again.
Also, Microsoft has a tool to download Windows 8 ISOs - no need to bother with the OEM.
Dell actually has a line of laptops that ship with Linux [1]. You don't get a choice of distro (they ship with the latest Ubuntu LTS), but the fact that it ships with Linux out of the box means that the hardware has all been pre-verified for Linux compatibility, and installing a new distro should be a matter putting in the install media and grabbing a cup of coffee.
Used Thinkpads have been very, very good to me over the years. For most of the last decade I bought used Thinkpad T42's for $100-$200 (see the empirical depreciation curve here [1]), beat them up for a year or two, then swapped the hard drive into a fresh machine when I finally and inevitably killed the old one. No downtime, no waiting for repairs, no tears shed over the death of a fancy laptop.
If you're on a budget, or in situations where repair downtime is unacceptable (eg travelling and working internationally) it looks from this guide like a master + spare from the T4xx-T5xx series is your ticket.
Even with the upgrades, they still cost me little enough that I wouldn't mind too much if one died, and I've always got at least one spare and ready to go.
I use a MacBook Pro but have recommended Thinkpads to Windows-using friends. A couple years ago I actually knew a site that re-sold decommissioned corporate models for okay prices and very low bullshit. Wish I could remember the name.
In the past few months I built myself an x200 with a brand new 9 cell battery, 128gb SSD, new keyboard, and 8gb ram for less than $200.
Knowing that you're running a fully free system is priceless.
The case of the toaster is very clear: we can't tell,
except by taking it apart, whether it has a processor and
software or a special-purpose chip. Since that we can't
tell the difference, it makes no difference: therefore, a
program that will never be changed is equivalent to a
circuit. I don't care whether a toaster or microwave oven
contains software.
Where does a device's toaster-nature stop and its TiVo-nature begin?
Its the difference between me selling you a computer you own and control, and giving you a user account while retaining root control for myself. The first is a sale and transfer of ownership, and the other is me renting out cloud access. From a perspective of rights, liberty, autonomy, control, and privacy, a toaster and a TiVo is two completely different kind of devices. One is your property which you control, and the other is someones else device which you have bought permission to use.
Last, let me clarify with an example. Let say I rent you a coffee machine on indefinite period of time, on the condition that you pay me $1 per cup. Simple concept, common practices in many offices, and it is easy to understand who the property owner of the device. Now lets change the setup by actually selling the device to you, but where DRM restricts the device so only my coffee is permitted, which just happens to add an extra cost of 1$ per cup compared to other brands. Has anything actually changed?
If the source was available I would already have done it.
But then again, if the manufactorer had just tried to replicate the traditional knobs and dials then the source would not had mattered.
The computer now boots into GRUB (loaded in the motherboard ROM) and from there loads grub in the disk drive.
When I received the laptop the battery was dead, wouldn't last one second. After libreboot it seems that linux energy management is less conservative and the battery now is charged and lasts 3h+.
Apparently with the x10 series they switched over to NVidia and I've been told those work better.
I believe AMD is no better. But ARM CPUs are getting faster and faster, and most of them have no upgradable microcode, which probably means little or no microcode at all; if you truly believe in free software, get something with one of those (and hope you can avoid the nightmare of ARM SoCs' GPUs). Having the HDL source to the CPU would be even better (see lowRISC), but one step at a time...
Currently on a W540. Not very happy, but after some configuration is passable, cool and fast. Quality should be on par with others, maybe better.
Excellent quote. We have four in the house at the moment but I'll be donating two to my sister's favourite charity over the summer. I use ex-corporate recycled ones and the X60s are showing their age a bit.
UK: An ex-corporate X200 from one of the big re-furbishers comes in at around £90 delivered to your local Argos. Debian has no issues apart from the need to install non-free wifi firmware.
They are still doing them and still do the Argos thing
Use the ebay search term 'WINDOWS 7 IBM Lenovo X200 Laptop Core 2 Duo'
The URL is one of those very long ones with numbers in that never work properly. I got the 2Gb X200 one and it is fine with Debian SID and an encrypted hard drive (LUKS).
Granted, it still works, just not well. However I have a pre-iPad Lenovo IdeaPad S10-3t that has seen pretty constant use as my daily driver Xubuntu laptop for almost five years now. I've probably put thousands of running hours on it and it still works like a (slow and ancient netbook) dream.
They're tough, but certainly not completely indestructible. I thought they were until the water incident.
The keyboard and the wifi card together would only be like $60 though, which is really nice.
I don't know if other notebooks has the ease of repair of a thinkpad. Maybe the Dells.
I still love the design ascetic of these laptops and I wouldn't be surprised to find myself buying one in the future.
Thats my W540, sans plastic covers. The inners are solid magnesium.
Getting the 1600x900 screen gives you a usable resolution but the panel is still terrible. Dim, headache inducing.... Other than that those machines are great. Light, small (if not really that thin), lots of slots and bays, huge used market, spare parts galore, lots of battery options, incredible keyboard and the track point, great Linux compatibility.... The only other bad aspect is the touchpad is mediocre.
It's hard to understand exactly how bad the panel is until you've used it. The color shift is worse than anything I've ever seen on any display, and the resolution was terrible, but the real kicker is the space between every pixel. It's like a black grid with colored specks in it.
If T60 could get a 2048x1536 panel, why can't we get a 1080p one or at the very least a 900p one that doesn't suck?
I'm inclined to believe that colors look dim because it's a matte panel- don't Mac's come with glossy panels only?
* Utilitarian but beautiful designs: http://www.geocities.jp/kenjin_keyboard/butterfly_p07.jpg
* Great input devices (mouse and keyboard)
* High density square screens
* Upgradeable Linux/BSD friendly hardware
With the advent of great, cheap ARM processors and Coreboot getting ported to ARM, the barries of entry should be a bit lower. Frankly, while Apple tends to produce great hardware, they are far too optimised for consumers vs developers. E.g., brittle aluminium + glass vs Thinkpad's magnesium + carbon fiber.
I wish it was also a bit less plasticky; something like Macbook Air + Nub + Old Thinkpad keyboard + Black Rubberized body + WACOM would be a dream come true. Hardware upgradeability on top of that would be epic.
And over the past decade, Apple's hardware has gotten really good. Their trackpads have always been nice, but the new force touch version is the indisputable best. Current Apple laptops contain many clever design decisions that most of us don't explicitly notice, but together make the machine feel first-rate.
This is unlike my ThinkPad x140e, which has idiotic design galore. The microphone is placed in the palm rest, making it nearly useless. Typing makes speech inaudible. The keyboard lacks an LED for caps lock, yet there are annoying always-on LEDs in in the palm rest and lid. Instead of gradually ramping fan speeds up and down, it switches between discrete levels, causing unnecessary distraction. And while it's one of Lenovo's smallest laptops, it's comically huge and heavy compared to my MacBook.[1]
Obviously, these two machines are apples and oranges. They target different users and price ranges. It is unfair to compare them. Still, it's frustrating to see so many bone-headed design choices in the ThinkPad. Just a little more thought and testing could have made it a much better machine. Sadly, this is true even for Lenovo's most expensive models. The X1 Carbon comes with useless stickers on the palm rest, and peeling them off leaves a residue that requires solvents to remove. These annoyances may be small, but they add-up to give an impression of tackiness.
Your older notebook is just a low budget consumer device with the ThinkPad brand name attached. Sad, but true, Lenovo recently transformed also their business notebook series to low quality consumer style form factors. The last good devices are the T420/X220 series.
I'm surprised by the "no true ThinkPad" responses. How am I supposed to know which ThinkPads are real ones? Apparently the X220 is, but not the X230? The only differences seem to be some keyboard tweaks, the trackpad, and newer CPUs.
Linux on Thinkpad is rock solid, but you have to get a real Thinkpad and not just something Lenovo slapped the name on. Get something from the series that existed before Lenovo bought the brand, the descendants of the T60/X60. Nothing with non-Intel CPU/GPU.
There is Linux/Thinkpad wiki which is fairly regularly updated. Look at that before you buy unless you know which models are from the Thinkpad lineage.
(But, Linux on Apple? Didn't even know that worked. Don't they source their own parts for which there are no Linux drivers? My laptop is my one tool, I don't want to download drivers. That's supposedly what Windows users do. I have no time for it.)
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8847915
[2] http://www.ubuntu.com/certification/hardware/201309-14195/
[3] http://www.ubuntu.com/certification/desktop/models/?level=Ce...
I have an X120e, and I bought it since it was the absolute cheapest I could find that still had some "Thinkpadness" to it. I can see that the model line went downhill from there.
Again, it's a ton of small things that need to be done right to impress a feeling of quality. I would love to see that sort of quality from a company other than Apple, but lately I'm coming up empty.
1. Caps lock was replaced with home/end. Escape moved to backtick/~, which was placed between right ctrl and alt. Backspace and delete were put right next to each other. Oh, and all the function keys were removed. See http://college.wfu.edu/itg/wp-content/uploads/keyboard.png for the whole horror show.
Adaptive "keys" -> avoid like the plague
Sadly, the ones that are comparable on price, like x250, still ship horrible HD displays that are a big step down for someone used to retina.
I will say, all used laptops have badly aged batteries. I get about three half to four hours from a 9(!) cell battery on the T400. That's bad by most metrics but good for the age of this thing.
PS - The matte display and keyboard feel makes it all worth while.
- X60s that I sat on. 1024x768 really sucks. ~$70
- X61 still running strong on ubuntu, 32G ssd too small for anything else. 1024x768. ~$75
- X200s that I loved. 1440x900. Windows and Crunchbang Linux. Rare but routine video/display issues & blue screens. :( 128G SSD went into the T61p. ~$220
- T61p too heavy to pick up. 1920x1200. With 8GB and an SSD, it's not slow at all. Display hinge has half an inch of play. Still running windows. ~$250
I won't buy another Thinkpad. I would buy a Dell Precision M4800 (to replace the T61p) and I still like 11" MacBooks (to replace the x200s). Needless to say old Thinkpad batteries are shot, though 1440x900 and 1920x1200 look(ed) great.
I ordered two for my business recently. I chose the Intel AC 7260 network adapter, which turns out to have all kinds of problems connecting reliably to 802.11n networks (the vast majority). On my laptop specifically, the motherboard and/or video card had major problems resulting in failure to shut down, an endless cycle of video adapter driver crashes and re-initializations resulting in system lockup, problems waking up from sleep, etc. I returned mine for a replacement, only to find the keyboard was absolutely horrendous--keys would double-press (bounce) almost every other key when typing fast and with moderate to heavy pressure. Upgrading the BIOS did not help as it apparently did with other Dell models.
Also, Dell refuses to refund my money on the now two defective laptops because I'm outside of the 30 day refund window. They wouldn't make an exception. I told them I was never purchasing a Dell again. I can (and did) buy a 2014 MacBook Pro with better specs for the same price and now I'm running Windows in Boot Camp (for .NET development) with flawless performance. Combined with a 3-year Apple Care agreement, I never have to worry about being nickeled-and-dimed over way-too-short refund periods.
In short, avoid Dell. They are shipping substandard hardware and are even getting things that should be commoditized to perfection (the keyboard) wrong.
The story gets better though, Dell shipped a demo model of a new XPS15 recently and we discovered the improved USB3.0 GigE adapter that it ships with is now stable, so got them to swap the older ones out but customers shouldn't really be testing hardware that is unable to perform its basic function reliably.
$ lspci|grep VGA 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation Device 0ff6 (rev a1)
Compared to what you get nowadays for about the same specs (or worse) but a more expensive price tag, I think it's a very good deal.
I recently snagged a used T420 on eBay for ~ $180. After selling the memory and screen that came with it and adding _more_ memory, a higher resolution screen and a SSD I had lying around, I've now got a fairly beefy box that runs Hyper-V like a champ and can chew through video encodes for ~$250. Oh, did I mention it runs for 5 hours on the 6-cell battery it came with?
Certainly doesn't hurt that you can't go more than 100 yards in my town (near Washington, DC) without running in to a closet stuffed full of them.
For a reliable workhorse, hard to go wrong with a used T410-430.
But the T430 and later models got worse and worse. The also changed the traditional good keyboard with trackpoint to a cheap slim keyboard you can find in every other notebook.
I would buy a new T4xx notebook if the focus again on high quality business notebooks and not lower quality fashionable stylish notebooks.
For all other models you can disable the trackpad in the BIOS, rendering it harmless.
However it's only accessible from their energy management tray program on Windows, so if you do a clean Linux install right away, you won't even know about it. You need to try the kernel module pointed out in the sibling comment.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1239578
An Intel card is only about $20 off ebay, but you need to open the laptop in order to replace it.
You can find hacked firmwares to remove the whitelist functionality, but that depends on your willingness to run hacked firmware.
Jesus that should be made illegal on laptops. MSI did that with the wireless card. (Won't buy a product from them again) There is no reason that I shouldn't be able to switch out what's in the mini-pci slot.
http://web.archive.org/web/20110720220124/http://www-03.ibm....
Still annoying though.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008V7AAJU/ref=oh_aui_detai...
Still, build quality wise, it feels like I haven't seen the end of the T61 (when this thing inevitably falls apart).
For the most part I have simply booted Ubuntu install images and had no problems at all. On some models I reprogram the fan controllers because I don't like the fan noise and the defaults are too conservative on thermal margins anyway.
I'd recommend a Tx30(s/p) depending if you want 14" or 15" screen. Just get one with a resolution >1376x768 and a good CPU. You can easily upgrade the rest.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008V7AAJU/ref=oh_aui_detai...
http://www.microcenter.com/product/438199/X551MAV-EB01-B_156...
Here's Lenovo's blog post about that from 2007: