Comment by arianvanp
15 hours ago
I used my ThinkPad T430s for 12 years. I got it second hand from a developer I looked up to when I was in college and it carried me through a large part of my career. Loved that machine to death.
When I finally replaced it with a Framework a few years back I've regretted every second of it.
The ThinkPad still lives. I refurbished the batteries and slapped ChromeOS Flex on it and donated it to a Ukrainian refugee who needed a Chromebook for school. It'll probably live another 10 years.
I loved that thing to death. And I'm just happy it is still being used.
I had the T431s for over a decade as well.
Replaced the keyboard (orange juice spillage), screen (upgraded to a higher resolution panel), hdd (to an SSD of course), RAM, Wifi adapter (Wifi 6) as well as the battery.
I now use an X1 Nano and while it's nice (and very light!) I am sad that the upgradability is nowhere near as good.
I loved my T430s. I swapped the keyboard out for a backlit one, and took out the DVD drive and replaced it with a hot swappable second battery. I was running Ubuntu MATE on it, it worked very well for me. The ThinkLight was also great.
I now have a second hand T480s which is also a wonderful machine, but not as amazing as that T430s. I gave my T430s to my mother who uses it to run software (albeit via Windows now) for her sewing machine.
I'm using my ThinkPad T520 daily driver right now.
With its non-chiclet keyboard, I type 12+ hours every day, never any discomfort.
Last year, I bought a late-model ThinkPad, to experimentally try replacing the T520. So I could have some local GPU compute, and not have to stockpile dwindling rare high-spec replacement units, in my minimalism lifestyle. But I haven't yet felt motivated to try out the new one, and see whether I can move to a not-as-good keyboard layout and a suspicious key action.
I still use my old T420, though less than I used to. Coincidentally, the RAM died this week, but a $30 investment later, and it lives again. At this point, I think I've repaired or replaced every single swappable component aside from the display.
I still have two 2013 era t430s, one with windows 7 and one with windows 10. When browsing the web they barely feel any slower than my corporate supplied t14 gen 2 or p1 gen 6 both with windows 11 now. I guess that’s the price of security.
I went through an odd series of emotions reading this lol.
ChromeOS made me throw up a bit but the recipient made me smile. May it serve them well.