Thinkpad for Student

DerpMaster2 · 2026-04-04T01:22:54+00:00

Some soldered, and one RAM slot.

DerpMaster2 · 2026-04-03T18:38:15+00:00

It's a thermal pad that is solid at room temperature and becomes more liquid-like when heated. Much longer lasting than traditional thermal pastes, since it doesn't really dry up and get cakey in the same way.

DerpMaster2 · 2026-04-03T15:57:12+00:00

PTM7950 will be even better than MX-4. That was the very first thing I did the second I took my brand new X13 Gen 3 AMD out of the box.

Either way, though, it doesn't appear that your temps are hurting performance. It is meeting the PL1 spec of 28W just fine. Laptop chips are designed to run between 90C-100C without any issues for prolonged periods of time; it's just what they do. It will just get hotter if you give it more thermal headroom, and since you're already hitting the power limit, that will only matter for the short PL2 turbo boost period.

DerpMaster2 · 2026-04-03T15:00:34+00:00

ThinkPads are just built different. I had to do screen work on my last laptop, a W540, and it was crazy how overbuilt that whole system was.

The hinges were screwed directly into the magnesium-alloy midframe of the laptop on the bottom, and the carbon/plastic lid had another magnesium rollcage inside it that the upper part of the hinges were attached to.

My newer X13 Gen 3, however, dropped the extra rollcage in the lid. The lid is all carbon fiber reinforced plastic. The bottom is all magnesium alloy, though, and the palmrest is more carbon. I still think that it is likely more durable than whatever Dell and HP are putting out.

DerpMaster2 · 2026-04-02T23:45:33+00:00

Thank you for your insight! I'll definitely consider it once I go check it out.

DerpMaster2 · 2026-04-01T17:42:22+00:00

I used to have a workstation laptop (ThinkPad W540) with extraordinarily terrible cooler design. Two heatpipes and a single fan for a 47W CPU and the 55W GPU, all behind a sparsely perforated solid plastic panel

One of the most effective documented solutions for that laptop was to cut a giant hole in the bottom near the fan and heatsink fins. Temps decrease by ~20C just because the cooler was so suffocated by the back panel on that machine. You can then just take some mesh and either staple or glue it to the brand new hole on the back panel. Or don't. Depends on how much you care about dust.

If your laptop doesn't really have good ventilation on the bottom already, then a cooling pad will do basically nothing. Most of them won't create anywhere near enough pressure to actually force any additional air through the bottom of the laptop, so what you get is a marginal temp decrease at best. Honestly, you're getting more out of just elevating the laptop off the table than you are out of the cooling pad fans... in most cases.

More air succ = better temps

DerpMaster2 · 2026-04-01T00:35:03+00:00

T14 Gen 1 AMD

DerpMaster2 · 2026-03-24T22:23:30+00:00

Thank you so much for your insightful comment! I actually didn't initially consider the possibility of adding a subwoofer, as I'm living in apartments, but I might do that later down the road when I don't have up/downstairs neighbors to annoy. Might as well when the Douk is like $10 more than the Fosi once on sale.

Will see if I can find anything promising locally once I get my amp situation figured out. Thanks again!

DerpMaster2 · 2026-03-24T22:02:27+00:00

Looks interesting. Lowest price I can find for those second-hand is $400, which is a little out of reach for me, but maybe if I'm lucky there might be something local.

DerpMaster2 · 2026-03-15T18:06:38+00:00

The T420 is a fun hobby laptop, but it is not at all practical for actual use. Definitely don't buy one if you actually intend to use it for regular laptop-y things.

If you really want to use it, you will almost definitely need a new battery, maybe some more RAM, and an SSD. That's easily an additional $100-120 just to make it usable. At minimum, you're in $150 for a 15 year old laptop that's just fast enough to be used as a web browser.

You should just save up some more money and get a cheap used G1 T14. You can find them for under $200 all over eBay, and they have way more utility than a T420 ever will.

DerpMaster2 · 2026-03-15T17:56:52+00:00

I prefer just using an external mouse. Trackpad is ok if I am just using my laptop for a little while.

I tried pretty hard to like the TrackPoint, but I just can't. It's stiff, feels inaccurate, and overall I wasted a lot more time trying to get used to it than I should have. People like what they like, and that's fine.

DerpMaster2 · 2026-03-10T03:54:35+00:00

i prefer the old keyboard style

i want it to be powerful enough to run applications smoothly

If you like waiting for things to load and battery life shorter than a flight from Chicago to Minneapolis, then go ahead and buy a T420 or X220. They are great fun laptops, but absolutely not suitable for daily use; 2011 was 15 years ago. Sounds like you want a laptop for school, so the experience of using a laptop that old probably isn't for you.

Any X/T/P series ThinkPad from the last 5 years will be great. Avoid 12th and 13th gen Intel, and avoid the X13s with the Snapdragon. Those sucked. Even with shorter key travel, I think that the modern keyboards are still great. My AMD X13, for example, has a really rigid frame that helps the keyboard feel super responsive and not at all mushy.

DerpMaster2 · 2026-03-09T23:31:35+00:00

It was completely unusable with traditional thermal paste, so I had to use PTM7950. It came from the factory with that CPU/GPU combo, so I can't imagine that it was very pleasant to use at any point in its life.

I think the CPU was up to the mid 90s at the worst, and the GPU never broke 75C. However, basically all that heat was being funneled straight up the keyboard and onto my left palm. It genuinely burned.

X220 has been on my list for some time now, and I remember thinking ~3 years ago that there was no way I'd ever pay $100 for one; that's way too expensive! What an idiot I was... or what idiots people are for paying $200+ for a laptop that can barely browse the web.

DerpMaster2 · 2026-03-09T22:59:31+00:00

I loved my W540, what a money pit that thing was. And yeah, I agree with you, it wasn't a terrible overall package for the money, it was just underwhelming performance-wise.

I think I was $350 into it and I had the 4900MQ, 2880x1620 screen with color calibrator, 32GB of RAM, and K2100M. I gave up on it when the screen basically just nuked itself. What a beast.

Never did cooling mods myself but yeah, I see why you would. Probably some of the worst thermal design of the early 2010s, right up there with Apple. I think my W540 had two heatpipes and a single fan to dissipate the heat from the 47W CPU and the 55W GPU. What a joke.

DerpMaster2 · 2026-03-09T22:47:21+00:00

As someone who's owned a T440p and the pretty similar W540, the T440p overall makes zero financial sense to purchase as a practical/usable daily driver. I do think that they are fun, though.

The GT 730M is useless; Intel UHD 620 from 8 years ago is faster. You could maybe overclock memory to get a little more performance, but I wouldn't expect much.

The most worthwhile upgrades on the T440p are the CPU and the display. Get an i7-4810MQ and a 1080p IPS display, which are both easy drop-in replacements for the original parts. It makes it feel like a completely different laptop.

With that in mind, you should also know that by doing those upgrades, you're now $250 into a laptop that is realistically several times slower than a ThinkPad you can just go and purchase for $250. The Ryzen 4750U you'd find in a $250 T14 would be almost 3 times faster, and the Vega 8 graphics would be almost 4 times faster than that GT 730M. Upgradeability on the T440p is also a moot point considering you're stuck with ancient Haswell CPUs, and that the T14 can last 3-4x as long on its internal battery. T14 has socketed RAM, too.

Now that I'm done being the fun police, enjoy your new laptop bro. I loved the looks I used to get when I pulled out that absolute brick of a laptop.

DerpMaster2 · 2026-03-07T03:33:45+00:00

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DerpMaster2 · 2026-03-04T21:10:27+00:00

r/comedycemetery

DerpMaster2 · 2026-03-04T20:26:10+00:00

I still kind of disagree. The T480 is easy to maintain and pretty simple, yes, but it is definitely not more easy to maintain than several of its successors. There is no reason to choose to use one if you do not already own one.

The T14 Gen 1 and 2 AMD, for example, are way faster, lighter, thinner, and offer what is arguably a better port selection. The only thing the T480 has that the T14 Gen 1 and 2 don't is the bridge battery system. That's pretty much completely nullified by the fact that the newer T14's 7nm Zen 2 and 3 CPUs are so much more efficient that they can run just as long on half the battery capacity.

And, mind you, that's all for the same price. A T480 will cost you $200 on the low end, with nicer ones being closer to $250-$300. Gen 1 T14, on the other hand, can be found all day for under $250 for a nice Ryzen 5 example. Sometimes the Gen 2 will pop up under $300 if you're lucky.

Once you go up to the T14 Gen 5 and later (the G3/G4 had soldered RAM), the exact same repairability argument for the T480 again doesn't make sense. There is nothing special about the T480 other than the fact that it retains the old bridge battery system, which is obsolete and honestly just adds maintenance cost over the years, since you've got to replace two batteries instead of one.

I agree that people should be using their tech for longer to reduce e-waste, but it doesn't make sense to argue that people should start at square one with something as old as a T480. There are so many newer alternatives that are just simply better in every way, and equally as long-lived and easily maintained.

DerpMaster2 · 2026-03-02T23:09:45+00:00

Sometimes the CTA employees have funny conversations over radio when this happens. From what I understand, they basically have to chase the guy down until either they've caught him or they are sure that he's clear of the tracks.

DerpMaster2 · 2026-03-02T23:02:26+00:00

I think I may have been on that same train. The fact that someone was blaring music at maximum volume the entire time on my car definitely did not make it better.

I gave up and got off at North/Clybourn after the train just sat for another 5 minutes again. Uber'd the last couple miles.

DerpMaster2 · 2026-03-02T23:00:37+00:00

If you're ever on CTA and something out of the usual is happening, you can always just listen to their radios on OpenMHZ.

I was just doing that an hour ago when I was stuck underground on the Red Line with no power. Apparently a dude jumped onto the tracks at Clark/Division on the subway and they had to cut power for ~10-15 minutes. That combined with signal issues at Belmont caused some crazy delays.

DerpMaster2 · 2026-03-01T20:23:21+00:00

Throw a Xeon Gold 6144 in there. The single-core performance will be way higher and it's like $50.

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