Lenovo ThinkPad T420

Pretty much the same trajectory. I started at my T420 around 2010 and that time I just main laptop, computer. Then, as I have a more powerful desktop, this T420 becomes my secondary computer and I started to experience Linux with it. After almost 15 years I end up converted it into a PVE host and run just one or two virtual machines on it and it's quite durable I can still do functional work on it, quite remarkable how a computer can last so long.

AOL 'me too' here :) Same here, but 10 years (6.1). The T420 I have is also my travel laptop. pledge(2) and unveil(2), which is in firefox, makes me feel even more secure while away from my home router. Upgraded to 8.0, started it, made tea during download, ran sysmerge(8) amd pkg_add -u and done.

Thinkpads are amazing. I also currently run a T420 from 2011, and it just works rock solid. Thanks to it's great connectivity, I use it right now with two monitors (under Linux) where my much newer 2019 Thinkpad X1 yoga is powered off somewhere in the shelf. I bought it only to have a more lightweight and mobile notebook.

My old T420 has had an ExpressCard adapter to add USB 3.0 for ages. At the time I added it the laptop was already old and had been purchased used from this software engineer Russian kid in SF. He sold it to me for 250$ cash and had already upgraded it to 12GB of RAM and an SSD internally (which were cutting edge for the time). I believe he was maybe running OSX on it because part of the reason it was cheap was that it had a permanent imprint of a giant apple sticker on the cover (since removed). He had bought it in Russia (so Russian hybrid printed keyboard which always made it a cool party trick but still easy to type english on). It still works to this day. I was able to easily take it apart years later, redo the cooling paste, upgrade the wifi card, and add that USB 3.0 adapter. It also has an eSata port which means it works great for quickly reading bare drives (with an external adapter you plug a HDD into like a damn SNES Cartridge). Dedicated GPU and i7 means it easily even runs a lot of games as well and run up to 3 plus displays. Still my favourite laptop keyboard ever and I used it for about 8 years and multiple jobs. Now it occasionally plays totally completely legal content to my TV or is an emulator machine with a few bluetooth adapters to DS4 controllers. edit: Based on reading more about these adapters this is definitely super cool but also (functionally) not that amazing for these thinkpads specifically. One of the big downsides of ExpressCard is that it is eas

I've refused to give up my laptop, a T420 i7 8GB, from 2011. It's the keyboard. SSD upgrade and battery. When leaving my manager tried to give it as a leaving gift, but was blocked (I bought a second hand one for myself with similar upgrades for a ridiculously low price instead). As a compromise it will forever sit in her desk 'in case you come back'. Give the employer they want and need, justified. A business or tech head (not just manager, but someone the buck really stops with) has a budget and they should spend it as justifies the business case, not conforming to an arbitary rule.

Sorry if I'm misunderstanding: Lenovo T420 is a laptop, a Thinkpad that's about 2.5 kilos, and doesn't have a touch screen. I like my T420 a lot, especially the build, keyboard, screen, general familiarity. I've used it for 7 years (i7, replaced the original HDD with an SDD a while ago, replaced the battery too). But a T420 is far different than a tablet with a touchscreen that weighs a few hundred grams.

I've been using a T420 or an X220, sometimes both, for about 6 years now since I gave my last newly-purchased Mac to my wife, the keyboard was just so awful but she doesn't care. I bought a Thinkpad 25th year anniversary edition (basically a T470 with a classic era keyboard) but the case cracked by the hinge, which is a design flaw that's inevitable as the metal hinge is screwed into the plastic frame. Once it failed I "went back" to the T420 and found it's aged like fine wine. The keyboard's great, even the stock screen while limited in viewing angle, is perfectly tolerable.

The T420 has been my main daily driver for nearly 6 years (using it right now to type this!) and I super excited to check this post out in more depth as battery duration is one of my biggest personal complaints about the system. To those wondering about the T420, they are fantastically rugged and I still think they are the best laptop on the market assuming you can handle either a slightly crap monitor or the hassle to upgrade it. I've dropped them onto concrete, dremeled them, even lit them on fire, most of the time they'll take the abuse but even when they don't, they are dirt cheap so who cares! Ebay has them listed at $150 a replacement, you can literally buy nearly 10 of them before scratching the entry point for a Macbook. All of this while being able to a modern web-dev development setup thanks to it's incredibly simple upgrade bays.

+1. I've had a T420 for about 5-6 years now. Added an SSD to it and it still works great. It's my secondary laptop now, and I have the 2015 X1 Carbon that is my daily-driver that I couldn't be happier with. It's light, portable, and its battery is a champ. I run Win 8.1 with things like Chrome, Visual Studio, Word/Excel, light Photoshop/Illustrator, and some Xubuntu virtual machines. I'd recommend either of these laptops. In fact, we just bought a few more T420's for the office, gave them SSDs, and installed Xubuntu. They work great.

I used a T420 for 3 years in university. Great sturdy laptop, great upgradability. Still up and running on Arch Linux at home. You can have a similar config (2520m with the nvidia) with a T420s for pocket change as we speak. While it cannot have a 9 cell battery like the T420, you can swap the DVD Drive for a battery! You can also put in a m.sata SSD and remove the 2.5inch drive. Great hardware for Linux.

"I can buy a MBP for $2000, use it for 3 years and sell it used for $1000." I've used a refurbed Thinkpad T420 for about a year now. It cost me $350 to buy, and I expect it to last at least 2-3 years. Less than $10 a month, and it's more than fast enough to do absolutely everything I need to do. Not too shabby for a 6 year old machine. The only reason for buying a brand-new computer is if you absolutely need the highest end of computing power, or need the very newest peripheral ports for some reason.

The thing will old laptops from last decade is shitty screen color. I love my t420, but the screen is literally too painful to look at for a long time. So my favorite one is the thinkpad t14g1, with ips screen, and lightweight

My old T420 still works and I still always smile when using the keyboard on it. Pure bliss.

I use a t14 gen 2 now but I still have my t420 w/ extra disk in the bay in my closet. Recently took it out and man, it's still the best keyboard I ever used.

Ever had a GoPro? Or professional camera? Drone? It's really not so hard to imagine a market for replaceable batteries lol. My ThinkPad t420 had a small built in battery so I could switch batteries without shutdown. Imagine the magic. Imagine taking 20+ hours of laptop battery with you 15 years ago.

T400 is definitely cool, I have a T420 I love. But that Aptiva... man, when those were new, they were full of more bloatware than any other machine I'd ever seen. I made bank in high school just reinstalling windows for people on those... it was like 5x faster when I was done with it, easily. I think it's made it impossible for me to see that as a beauty, though.

Nobody responsible or competent is scrapping DDR5 computers yet. You can't use other speed standards of RAM in a computer designed for a faster (or slower) standard. If it needs DDR5 it can't use DDR, DDR2, DDR3, or DDR4. I don't think I've ever seen any x86 machine that could use older slower standards. You could use EDO in some FPRAM machines, and FPDRAM in EDO machines at a 15% speed penalty. You can use slightly faster DRAM in a machine that wants slower: later in their lives, I maxed out the RAM in some PowerMac G3 machines that wanted 66MHz DRAM using cheaper, already obsolete, 100MHz DRAM, or 133MHz DRAM in ones that only wanted 100MHz. But only within that standard. It's an idea that has some merit. I still use old Thinkpads that need DDR3 as what would have been prohibitively expensive when they were new is now cheap -- I have maxed-out 16GB X220 and T420 machines, and a near-full W520 with 24GB. But not DDR4, and you can't max out old DDR2 machines as big DDR2 DIMMs always were expensive and still are.

Mine did not age well. Had problems with the WiFi card crashing routers (killer Wifi). Developed issues with heat which caused problems with stability, video hardware has had all kinds of issues with heat also, can't play Youtube videos at anything over 480p without screen going nuts. Yeah, it still works and is about 6-7 years old but the problems started within 2 years of buying it brand new. Meanwhile I have an old Asus Laptop from 2012 running Win10 still going strong.Same goes for my IBM T420 running Linux. Does all the email, video, office stuff I need it to do effortlessly and just won't die. I replaced the HD with an SSD and added 4 gig of mem back in the day. Will never buy another Dell machine, they make junk.

My old Lenovo t420 has been running 24/7 pegged as a multi-camera DVR since 2011, no issues whatsoever. Of course the battery is removed, but I don't see many decent laptops struggling running under load for prolonged periods.

Imagine you drop your laptop from a standing height onto a hard surface. Metal will bend and deform. Dent. Plastic will yield, then crack. You can then replace the cracked component, because the plastic took the vast majority of the force so the metal frame on the inside that holds everything together is fine. Same way you have squishy muscle to absorb impacts that might break your bones. Same way cars have crumple zones. I've been a Mac user primarily for 20 years. I've had or used extensively every generation of PowerBook and MacBook since the G4. I have two Thinkpads (T420, A485) and they both feel as solid as anything I've had from Apple, except when my MacBook Air slid off my couch onto its back corner, it misaligned the lid permanently, and my Thinkpads bounced.

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.

Way back when I was young and broke, I played through Half Life 2 and the episodes on a ThinkPad T420 using an ExpressCard/34 PCMCIA to PCI with a graphics card I borrowed and an old crappy PSU I pulled from a business Dell desktop. Managed to complete the games with decent graphics and framerate at the time. It wasn't an ideal setup, but I didn't care. In fact, I thought it was a cool hack to play games at the time without forking out a lot of money to build a gaming PC. Maybe there are probably better options now to game than attaching a dedicated GPU with whatever hardware you already have, but I can verify that external GPUs are really cool and useful (though a 5090 is definitely not needed). You also don't have to care about cooling the GPU, since it's "atmosphere" cooled (though headphones and/or ANC are a must).

My qualms with modern Thinkpads are as follows: No SD card slot (standard on many MacBooks so it's not like it's a niche feature) BIOS always displays at max brightness no matter what, blinding you when you're up too late, and always beeps when you go into boot selector or bios options, even if you have beeps disabled. Overall, compared to golden age ThinkPads like my old T60, T420,x230t, the BIOS is very uncomfy, which matters if you like to play with operating systems. The trackpads get disgusting so quickly, even if you washed your hands like 10 minutes ago. You cannot keep those things clean, they're like this, cheap soft plasticky material... Could do a lot better in this area. That weird little camera lip thing they're doing might be the ugliest thing I've ever seen on a laptop Some of them have the fans exhaust on the right side, so if you try playing a video game on them with a mouse it will make your hand uncomfortable.

Seems to be solely about AMD GPUs. I'm not a gamer but I do have two much-loved Thinkpads with built-in Nvidia GPUs I can't upgrade: a W520 with a Quadro 1000, and a T420 with an NVS 4200M. Both need the driver version 390 at the latest -- no later driver supports these GPUs -- and that driver won't build on any kernel later than version 6.5. The GPUs are unsupported in Debian 12 (let alone 13) and from Ubuntu 24.04 or later. This means Debian can't even enable a Displayport external screen, since the Displayport is connected to the Nvidia GPU. Some Ubuntu variants can bring up the GPU and Displayport but I suspect without acceleration. What's interesting to me is that I've found that since the beta of Pop OS 24.04, whose COSMIC desktop is Wayland–only, the GPUs are supported and work using FOSS drivers: the external screen works fine, it identifies both GPUs, I can choose to offload acceleration to the Nvidia chip. It's not very stable on the W520 but it seems very solid on the T420 so far. So, not a gamer, but in case this helps anyone else, I'm just putting it out there.

Every ThinkPad I ever owned is still setup and waiting to be used. My T420 is about 14 years old and I still use it from time to time. It was older than 5 years when I got it.