ThinkPad

I have a Thinkpad L440 that I use as a daily driver. I was looking for a laptop fan cooler, but I don't know if a fan base that just pours air from below is the most ideal, considering that the hot air comes out of the fan from the left side.

Is there some fan that might attach to the side and helps put cool air in the vent? Does that exist? Does that make sense?

Anyway, If what I say is nonsense, what fan cooler do you recommend for using with my laptop?

It will help a lot of considering that gets a bit hot while gaming, so I play for about one hour or 2, unless the game is pretty low weight like Half Life.

I know they never were an option since the T400/T500 days and I've seen people flat out say that even if they fit, they won't work with the T440P/T540P.

There are a bunch of different stores online selling the Hitachi LG BU20N as "for Lenovo T440P/T540P" and some also claim that the Matsushita UJ262 would work.

Has anyone got a Blu-ray drive in their T440P/T540P or knows if it would work?

Edit: Saw someone claim they got a Hitachi LG BU40N working in a T440P and since that's basically the same as the BU20N, with added UHD Blu-Ray support, that means the BU20N should work fine?

Next time I see them being sold at a reasonable price I'll grab one and just try it out for myself.

Edit 2: For anyone coming across this post in the future; I now have a HLDS BU20N (HP OEM) installed in my T540p and it plays back blu-ray discs without issue.

I'm considering buying a new thinkpad and possibly changing the battery out for a price up to 550 dollars, but preferably less. I mean to use the device for school and travel and do value battery life most, but prefer some better performance— I will be doing some image editing and video editing. Any recommends?

Edit: Plan to use Endeavour OS

I've bought batteries off of 3 sellers so far from eBay and all the batteries that I got were defective. I really want to bring this thing back to life and am wondering if anyone knows a website or seller that provides working batteries for the X60 Tablet? Thanks in advance!

I'm looking to buy a new thinkpad, I've seen a lot of people around the internet saying to stay away from lenovo.com. does anyone have any experience with lenovo.com or other resellers?

I got the 21K5001JUS, which has the R7 Pro 7840u, 64GB LPDDR5x 6400, and OLED 2880x1800. Ordered it August 20th, shipped expedited on September 1st, and arrived in the upper Midwest this afternoon, September 5th.

I updated to the latest Windows 11 Pro patches, no Lenovo updates in the Vantage software. My first impressions were:

1. The fan spins up and gets quite loud when installing Windows updates, but not nearly as loud as my P52s. Substantially louder than my T14s gen 1 AMD. Unfortunately I don't have my T14s gen 3 AMD just yet, I'm not sure of an ETA on that yet.
2. The OLED scaled to 1.5x really doesn't bother me. I think it's well worth the absence of backlight quality issues, and IPS glow. We'll see once I get into assessing battery life, especially coming from an M1 MBA for personal use.

It feels a little less premium than the T14s gen 1, with a little bit of flex in the lid and wrist rest. But it's crazy how far we've come since my T450s, which is like a workstation by today's size and weight standards.

Running Prime 95 with 8 cores and SMT, the fan can get a good bit louder than I would prefer, and than I would expect the T14s gen 4 will. But running GeekBench on Best Performance profile in Windows, the fan does spin up but is nearly silent.

In my experience of years with Thinkpads, especially the P52s, I expect the fan noise to be much less aggressive in Linux. I'll be assessing that next in Fedora 38, with and without a Windows VM running. Then, before truly assessing if I'm going to keep this or trade it in for a T14s gen 4 AMD with less RAM (opting against the VM workload), I'll do the same in Arch with the latest kernel and such.

Here are my GeekBench scores:

Recently I decided to update my coreboot, with some config changes. It worked, but after I put my laptop to sleep it doesn't boot anymore. (Power LED and fans turn on just for a second)

I tried disconnecting it from power, including the small bios battery. Still the same result. Tried to flash the previous version that worked — no result.

IIRC I compiled it with "Stage Cache for ACPI S3 resume" = "CBMEM". If it's related, how do I clear CBMEM?

Any advice that doesn't require soldering or repeated (dis)assembly?

UPD: Tried stock bios, no result :(

I bought a replacement battery that was not OEM off eBay. After about 4-6 months of use, the thing nearly blew up on me. The battery got so hot it could've started a fire. Seriously, spend the extra money, its not worth the risk.

If you're buying a replacement make sure it meets the safety standards and it is approved for use. I'm going to be buying only OEM batteries/chargers from now on.

A friend of mine gave a an old ThinkPad T41 and it's in great condition for one of these without any cracks in the chassis. There are a few marks on the display but it doesn't look like it's cracked (I don't have the right power supply to test it out).

The biggest problem with it so far is that the rubberised finish on the lid has turned sticky. I tried to wipe it down with diluted isopropyl alcohol and while it looks pretty clean now it's still very sticky.

Is there a way to fix the stickiness without full-on scraping the coating off?

It's the classic "you've plugged the charger in but you have to wiggle it a million times and get it in a perfect position for the laptop to actually charge". Obviously, this is less than ideal.

I've ordered a replacement charger just in-case it's the actual adapter that's the issue, but if the port itself is broken, does anyone know if this is fixable easily? Are there any guides anywhere? I guess maybe the pins inside could be bent or something

Edit: Conclusion at the bottom

I just sent my ThinkPad X13 Yoga Gen 2 in for service the other day, it hasn't yet reached the depot but I'm worried after seeing reviews online about Lenovo's customer service. I know people are definitely more likely to write a review if they have a bad experience than a good one.

The repair is just for the TrackPoint, which hasn't been really up to the old ThinkPads I've had (T23, T43, T61, T410, T460) and had recently stopped going to the right entirely. TrackPoints are the only reason I still buy ThinkPads and not something like a framework (and I don't think I can go back to non 2-in-1 laptop after this last one)

I also took the NVMe drive out and swapped it with one that had a fresh install of windows 11 on it so that I could use my data while it was sent in. Will they refuse to work on it if they have a non oem drive inside?

AFTER REPAIR EDIT: Just got it back from the warranty center! Instead of replacing just the TrackPoint module, they replaced the whole top cover & TrackPad (I did mention that it was having similar issues to them). Came with the factory plastic on it. They didn't try to short-change me in any way, didn't try to argue that it was normal or that it was wear and tear or anything like that. It works better they day it was new, and all of the scuffs that I had on the corners are now gone (so is my intel sticker but I can live with that).

In regards to the SSD being out, they didn't say anything or refuse service because of it. I was up front that I had been inside the device before I had sent it in, so YMMV, but all in all 10/10 experience

Hey everyone! You may remember me posting about a week ago about my t440p that would hard freeze after a couple minutes. I'm please to report that the problem seems to be resolved! So because this issue seemed to mostly happen while watching videos I suspected there was something wrong with the onboard graphics. Initially I was under the impression that the graphics chip was on the motherboard but then I learned it was built into the CPU itself. So I bought used CPU for $9 shipped on ebay and here I am typing my success story. By the way, this was like the easiest CPU to replace in anything. In the end was it the CPU or the graphics, I don't know. But its working now!

I bought it from eBay. It is the best computer Ive had in a while, even tho is somewhat old. I love it.

I come from 3rd world country (hence small monthly wage), and any pricier battery sold here having the same quality as the 15 USD battery (there are no original or near original battery sold here, and last time I tried to soldered new battery cell, I failed, miserably).

I need advice, because I don't plan buying new laptop, but need to be mobile (move around). X220 still fit my need and and I'm using up to date OS (Fedora 38 XFCE)

Any suggestion is appreciated. Thank you!

Hello everyone! So basically the title. I've already replaced the ram and tried running a different OS and still have this issue. The computer passes all of the onboard diagnostics. Just wanted to see if anyone else has encountered anything like this. Thanks!

I have bought an used T470 for Uni and so far it has been the best laptop I have ever had, and when times comes I need an upgade i wonder how much upgradeable a laptop like this can be.

The framework laptop promises to be an upgradeable and repairable laptop, not quite the same philosophy that makes thinkpads great, but I wonder if newer thinkpads are good enough to prefer over a framework.

So I ordered a replacement battery from a big eBay seller branded #CameronSino, as I could not find a genuine one anywhere.

But after the laptop is in my bag for some hours, I can turn on the laptop but there is no left capacity reportet. After reinstalling the battery, everything will be fine.

Anybody has an idea which manufacturer to chose? #Lenovo #Thinkpad #P71

This one is perfect for my budget (not counting shipping it to my country)

I wanna really get it but I want some second opinions.

I just wanna write while I put programming sucks on. And play classic Half Life.

I spent way too long to get it working and I was almost ready to give up.

I tried the standalone ISO updater with a LOGO.GIF file. It recognized the image, but after reboot the original Lenovo logo was still there. No error message, no warning, nothing.

Same with the Windows firmware updater.

The one thing that finally worked was a Winflash64.exe incantation found buried somewhere deep in the Lenovo forums 😠

Winflash64.exe -patch -logo logo.gif -exit

I've been trying to test Intel Rapid Start Technology on my X1C9 and see how it compares to os-driven hibernation.

But my firmware doesn't show the option for IRST. I've seen screenshots from other people having this in the Power section.

Is this even a thing on recent ThinkPads? Has anyone been able to enable it?

I have the partition with correct GUID type. I also have OPAL enabled on the drive, but I don't think it should affect this feature... or does it?

Got this T540p for free from work, it came with a dual-core i5-4200M, 8GB of RAM, the awful 1080p TN panel and the GT730M dGPU.

Upgrades: New TrackPad (T450 Synaptics), i7-4700QM, 16 GB DDR3L RAM, AUO B156HAN01.2, and a good clean (yep, that's an upgrade in my books).

The i7 runs quite well in there, I had some doubts about the thermal situation since it's a 47-watt chip in a dGPU model but so far it holds up pretty well with a -70mw undervolt and Arctic MX-4 thermal paste. Idle it gets up to around 45°C, under load I've never seen it get hotter than 75°C. In addition to Throttlestop, I'm using TPFC on the "smart" setting to keep the noisy Toshiba fan from ramping up and down every .2 seconds.

The GT730M isn't good for much these days but it runs older games quite well. All in all, I ended up really liking this ThinkPad. It's very annoying to take apart, though.