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ThinkPad addicts

showernota

Member
I work in IT and my organization is exclusively Lenovo. I’ve been able to work on everything from ancient Edges to the newest P16. We’ve had a few dells and HPs pass through, and the difference in quality and longevity is night and day. The T490 model was the closest I’ve seen to being a letdown, but even those are fairly solid. I think the T440p will always be my favorite.
 

ReBurn

Gold Member
I have two 14 inch thinkpads and a 17 inch thinkpad mobile workstation that I use for work.

My daily driver is a couple year old p14s with an i7, 32gb ram and 1 TB SSD. The 17 inch is also an i7 but with 64gb ram and 5 total TB SSD. It also has a keyboard with a 10-key numpad that I literally never use. I don't know the model number offhand. The other 14 inch is 3 years old now, but it's still a great machine. I leave it at home and use it when I work from there. If I need horsepower for something when working remotely I just RDP to the mobile workstation. I leave the 17 inch chained to my desk at work because I don't want to lug around a 14 pound laptop for any reason.

I'm thinking of moving daily work to a 14 inch X1 carbon after the first of the year. Or whatever gives me the best performance in a 14 inch profile at the time. I travel for work a lot so I don't like to carry a large, heavy laptop with me but I want enough horsepower to actually get work done on the go.
 

Tams

Member
X61T, X201T, X220T, and X230T are the only ones I care about.

The Helix was tempting, but far too expensive and lacking in features (like the number of keys on the keyboard).
 

gar3

Member
I use my T440p at home almost every single day. Upgraded the CPU last year to a 4712MQ.
The wife uses her JPN T400 all day, every day. Upgraded her CPU to a T9900, like, a decade ago.
My parents both have their own Thinkcentre E93z systems for everyday computing needs.

And we still have my wife's JPN 1161-72J.
 

The Fartist

Gold Member
Waiting on a dual-pipe heatsink for my T480 i5, temps currently hover between 55-65 at full load, using PTM7950 thermal pads on both the CPU and iGPU, hopefully, the dual-pipe will lower my temps 3-5 degrees. The T480 i5 model comes with a single-pipe. My T480 i7 runs pretty warm at full load, 70-75, with PTM and a dual-pipe. I'm loving my i5, the downgrade in performance isn't significant, but runs way cooler and the battery is almost twice as long, I do wish it had the MX 150 my i7 has, though. Running Fedora 40 KDE Plasma.
 

RagnarokIV

Battlebus imprisoning me \m/ >.< \m/
ThinkPad? After quickly google searching, isn’t this thread basically like a “Wish.com HiPhone appreciation club” but for laptops?
 

Quasicat

Member
We had them at work in our old building, then we built a completely new, state of the art, campus in 2012 where we transitioned to Surface tablet/laptops.
The only productive thing I did with my Thinkpad when it wasn’t docked was Solitaire. Solitaire ran really well on it. ☺️
 

The Fartist

Gold Member
We had them at work in our old building, then we built a completely new, state of the art, campus in 2012 where we transitioned to Surface tablet/laptops.
The only productive thing I did with my Thinkpad when it wasn’t docked was Solitaire. Solitaire ran really well on it. ☺️
Ouch, talk about a downgrade, Surface isn't serviceable, and they're fragile.
 

Quasicat

Member
Ouch, talk about a downgrade, Surface isn't serviceable, and they're fragile.
Absolutely! If I had a personal computer that ran like the Surface computers at work, it would be in the trash. We have so many problems with them, but our IT lead is so into Windows no matter how many problems they cause.
 

showernota

Member
My work deployed Surfaces for some users who needed tablets. I pivoted and picked up a Yoga instead the next time a tablet was needed, and it’s sooo much better than a Surface.
 

dem

Member
I gave someone a new thinkpad at work today

They complained that it looked 20 years old.

It was brand new

#ThinkpadLife
 
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The Fartist

Gold Member
Early XMAS gift to myself, T420 for $50 USD, swapped the garbage 768 TF panel with a FHD 1080 IPS 400nit display, upgraded RAM to max 16gb, added a 256gb SSD, re-pasted the CPU with Honeywell PTM7950 thermal pad, dusted the cooler fan, bought a 9 cell battery. She now runs beautifully under fedora 41 KDE/XFCE desktop environment.

image-a56480dd-7bb7-4627-a1f3-c9d32c491aaf.jpg
 

Trilobit

Member
I had to check and yes, my laptop is a ThinkPad T14 Gen 3. Not one of those snazzy ones with twistable screens, just a normal laptop. I haven't had any issues with it other than that Windows isn't an exciting OS. Battery time is perfectly okay if I run battery save mode and use Edge as the browser. It's quite remarkable how much more the other browsers suck battery.

I think I'll download some Linux distros some day just for fun.
 
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The Fartist

Gold Member
I had to check and yes, my laptop is a ThinkPad T14 Gen 3. Not one of those snazzy ones with twistable screens, just a normal laptop. I haven't had any issues with it other than that Windows isn't an exciting OS. Battery time is perfectly okay if I run battery save mode and use Edge as the browser. It's quite remarkable how much more the other browsers suck battery.

I think I'll download some Linux distros some day just for fun.
T14's are arguably the best all around ThinkPads, they're up to Gen 6 now with Intel/AMD/Snapdragon variants. They re-introduced having two ram slots from the Gen 5 on, which makes ThinkPad enthusiasts really happy, including myself. The last ThinkPad to have dual RAM slots was the T480 way back in 2018, from then on they had one RAM module soldered on and one open slot, pissed off a lot of ThinkPad enthusiasts, including myself. I'm looking into getting a T14 Gen 5 AMD when they come down in price, maybe next year when companies start to phase them out for Gen 6 and 7.

ThinkPads and Linux are a match made in heaven, all the hardware just works out of the box, I run fedora and debian, switching between KDE Plasma and XFCE. I only boot into Win11 when I feel like playing a game.
 
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The Fartist

Gold Member
can they run crisis ?
ThinkPads are built for durability, reliability, upgradability, the best keyboard in the business, and the glorious TrackPoint (red nipple) not gaming. But, yes you can run *Crysis with a decent dedicated GPU just fine.
 

The Fartist

Gold Member
I have a T480 with an i5 5250U + NVIDIA MX150 and I run Fallout3/New Vegas at max settings 1080 and get a consistent 60+fps. The MX150 is more or less equivalent to a GTX1050, perfectly fine for older games. If I want to do some real gaming I use my desktop with an R9 5900x + RTX370
 
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The Fartist

Gold Member
My Macbook kicks ass at video editing. But the lack of ports is shite.
But yeah the think pad is a work horse
I love my M1 MacBook Air, I dual-boot MacOS Sequoia and Asahi Remix fedora. It blows all my ThinkPads out of the water in both performance and battery life, I just keep daily driving my ThinkPads because the keyboards are light-years ahead of any MacBook, MacBooks don't have a TrackPoint, and my ThinkPads are so tough I don't worry about damaging them, also ports, I love them ports, and I can swap out parts in minutes, RAM, SSDs, screen breaks? Easy and cheap fix, spilled water on my keybaord? That's ok, my ThinkPad has drainage holes and I can swap out the keyboard in a snap. MacOS is really nice, though, if a little too restrictive, WAY better than Windows if you're not gaming.
 

Soltype

Member
We've been on lenovo's at work for over 10 years, I still see some t440s hanging around.
 
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sankt-Antonio

:^)--?-<
Meh, my Thinkpad broke down three years into its live, while every single Apple Mac went for so long that I just gifted it away to get rid of it and buy a new one (9-11 years in daily use).

Imo, as soon as IBM sold the Thinkpad line to Lenovo they have become crapy and overprieced.
 

The Fartist

Gold Member
Meh, my Thinkpad broke down three years into its live, while every single Apple Mac went for so long that I just gifted it away to get rid of it and buy a new one (9-11 years in daily use).

Imo, as soon as IBM sold the Thinkpad line to Lenovo they have become crapy and overprieced.
9-11 years? Please tell me you installed Linux, no Mac can be safely daylied for that long under MacOS, they have like a 7 year life span.

Not every ThinkPad (and, there are many, many to choose from) is made of equal quality, unfortunately, where as Apple only has to design two notebooks (MacBook Air and Pro).

I would argue Lenovo's T series is superior to Apple's build quality in some aspects, while not as refined and chiseled as Apple's machines, what it lacks in refinement it more than makes up for in durability for use outside of Starbucks. And any ThinkPad keyboard is far superior to anything Apple has to offer, even on their desktops. Apple's track pad is pretty hard to beat, though, but I don't remember the last time I used a trackpad. If Apple added a TrackPoint to their notebooks I would be there day one.
 
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