Lenovo ThinkPad X200

My daily driver is an x200 upgraded to 4gb of RAM. It runs as well as it ever did except the web has become slower and slower in that everything became an app. Things like GMail and YouTube are slow but honestly still fine, and in the worst case scenario I can jump onto my phone. My main use these days is recording and mixing music through an interface from 2014. With Reaper the experience is even better than when I picked the laptop up back around 2010.

I gave up on new Thinkpads and went to a 13" Macbook Pro Retina. I had a hard requirement to go with something with a smallish form factor and 16GB of memory. I almost decided to go with a Thinkpad X230 - I have used a X200 running Xubuntu for almost 6 years happily. The X200 just started to fall apart and I was bumping up against the 4GB memory in it frequently enough in the last year to make a change. The X230 would have been way cheaper and supported the 16GB of memory I was after. But work was paying, I try to maximize laptop ROI by not upgrading every year, and the screen on the retina is quite lovely. The trackpad, not as much. I miss the thinkpad red nub. But, debian Jessie installed very easily and so far, I really like the experience. I'm using XMonad, with very little customization, and in general it seems to be a solid machine. Check back with me in four years. If I'm still using this machine, the switch will have been worth it. I'm quite sad about how Thinkpads seem to be transitioning from serious, hacker-friendly tools to somewhat generic consumer-grade gear.

8 year old Thinkpad x200, Core2 2.4Gz. Bought second hand ~4 years ago, upgraded the RAM to 8GB, got a new 9 cell battery (still enough for ~7 hours of work). Got an SSD as gift. Currently running Debian unstable flawlessly. For work I really use whatever workstation my employer provides me, but this is my main machine at home for entertainment and personal projects; I hardly power on my more poweful desktop. Definitely the best machine I ever had: very light, still runs cool and completely silent when on battery power. It is not a speed monster, but it is still fast enough to browse even most complex websites (no webgl though). The screen is notoriously bad, but is more than enough for my needs. I dropped it about 6 months ago, and it stopped working. After considering buying a replacement (you can get a refurbished x200 for ~100£) I thought maybe it was time to buy a new machine, and was eyeing a new XPS 13. Then that evening it powered on again (probably a loose RAM). Never had a problem since

I've been using the same Lenovo X200 for four years and have been extremely happy with it. I'm running Linux on it these days after getting tired of dealing with Windows for the first year. The display resolution has become a drag though (same 1366x768 as the x220). I love the portability and durability of this machine, but I've notice I tend to hack when plugged into an external monitor more over the last year rather than just using the laptop alone. I've started eye-balling the X230, mainly because you can cram 16GB of ram into it. I would also consider looking at some of the newish T430s/T431s. Better displays, still under 4 lbs.If you buy a Thinkpad new, get the cheapest configuration you can and upgrade the memory (I've used crucial.com) and drop in an ssd yourself - you'll save hundreds of dollars.

Indeed. I know of two "best laptops ever made": Drew DeVault says it's the X200: https://drewdevault.com/blog/Fucking-laptops/ « The best laptop ever made is the ThinkPad X200, and I have two of them. » He has a very strong case. I own one. It is certainly one of the best ever. On the other hand, Brad Taunt says it is the X220: https://btxx.org/posts/x220/ « The X220 ThinkPad is the greatest laptop ever made and you’re wrong if you think otherwise. » Ulaş Türkmen agrees: https://okigiveup.net/blog/why-thinkpad-x220-is-the-best-lap... I also have two X220 machines, and I use them more than the X200 now. They still work perfectly, while my X200 is getting flakey. (Although with its SSD and 8GB of RAM, it runs Alpine very well indeed and could be a daily driver.) The X220 has a slightly shallowed screen; that's a weakness. But mine are 100% usable: between them, I run Haiku, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Ubuntu, and Pop OS, and all of them go like stink and are daily-drivable on this 2011 hardware.

i saw this video the other day on youtube (veronica's yt channel is great if you haven't watched!), and cool to see other people doing it as well. it reminded me of a similar setup i have, dubbed 'protocol7', which is a tty-only setup tailored for this kind of thing and for use on servers/headless pi setups. i use it for writing, intentional reading/browsing via lynx, managing gemini capsules (and reading gemini capsules - thank you amfora!), and just all-round "cozy computing". tmux-heavy, and (to me) very comfortable to use. my current 'protocol7' machine is my trusty old thinkpad x200. :)

I agree the discomfort, or after a while, even the pain when using the trackpoint, is something very noticeable on modern thinkpads. I don't recall being this annoyed with the older thinkpads like T61, x200 and all. Or maybe we are just getting old and more fragile haha

I like the status lights on my old X200 a lot (on/off, battery, disk, wlan I believe, and more). It's a shame we don't have them like that any longer in Thinkpads. We only get one or two LEDs indicating on/off status. But such things need to be done right.

I had a dock for my Thinkpad X200. It was a chunk of plastic the same size as the laptop but it also had a bay for a disc drive (since the laptop didn't have one) and also had a pop-out connector for charging a second battery. Since it was the same footprint, it didn't take up any extra desk space and still allowed you to use the laptop's own ports too (except for power), it just made the laptop thicker. And you could even take the dock on the go if you really needed the extra I/O and disc drive. Pretty innovative design when docks at the time were just a big box at the rear of the assembly.

I went from a X200 to work on my hobby OS 5 years ago, to a T440p with 16 GB of RAM for my daily computing, then upgraded to a T480 that I could fit with 64GB of RAM, and I finally added a X270 for a more compact form when I'm outside. They were all very inexpensive due to their age (when RAM was still cheap) and I'm really happy about them, I work from a console and a browser, they are perfect for my usage. I wouldn't use any other kind of laptop.

I have no idea why they did, but some pros: X200 is less expensive, (I think) it has a little more room, and it doesn't have the X220's crazy design flaw with the lid shell. I also had better luck getting genuine replacement keyboards for the X200. Half of the X220 keyboards I stockpiled arrived as substandard garbage, even though I was trying to avoid that.

I don't know about the X200S, but I had several X200 non-S, with Coreboot, up until recently, and they were worth repairing, as evidenced by resale value. (New keyboards are inexpensive (at least before tariffs), the replacement palmrest plastic part can be found and very easily replaced, you can still get batteries for them. And if you have a pressure mark on the LCD, apparently that's not a showstopper. Add a $20 SSD and max. the RAM, and it's better than new.)

The x200 was a really neat machine. They run great with linux mint - I have mine running as a home assistant server for our house since my raspberry pi died with flash card corruption.

You paid how much? I use my x200 every day and love it but never considered I could sell it for so much. Is that really a normal price for such an old model? My screen works perfectly too.

> You simply can't compare anything to MacBooks. I had a Dell that I paid about $2,000 for, and it was really good (or so I thought). Then at work, I got a MacBook Pro, and that's when I saw the difference. > > Its not only the Pros, no "high-end" laptop running Windows or Linux with just 8GB of RAM can perform better than a MacBook Air with 8GB. I don't know how Apple has optimized memory usage, but my personal feeling is that 8GB of RAM on Macs is equivalent to 32GB on non-Apple devices. > Thanks for confirming my point, we have actual benchmarks that objectively show this isn't the case but apple fanboys still make these sort of claims. The same with battery life, if you listen to apple fanboys you get the impression that battery life above 5h was simply unheard off until the M1 came along. I had a x200 in 2009 or 2010 that was giving me 10h+ in the large battery and I could even swap over to the smaller one to get another 6h (?) or so. > I'm not some Apple fanboy—I've been using Arch Linux daily for the past month or two, and it's great. However, there isn't a day that passes without screen freezes during peak usage, and I need to reboot every day or two. This happens despite having 32GB of RAM, an RTX 4060, and a Ryzen 5 7600. That never happens with my 5-year-old MacBook Air. The only thing I can say to that is that in my experience nvidia drivers have become objectively worse over the last 2 years. On my desktop I used to be able to play games without issues, but recen…

I've used Thinkpads consistently for 25-30 years, and still do. I can't really draw a line between "before" and "after" but if I take a long enough period I can definitely see differences in the experience getting watered down or generally worse, from less flexibility to lower reliability. I still have and regularly use a fully functional X200, somewhere in the box I have a fully functional T42 and an R31 whose only defect is a small screen blemish caused by me closing the lid with something on the keyboard. But my multiple X1 Gen1 and Gen2 all have various failures (screen, battery, webcam, or keyboard), my T450 has big battery issues, my T470s have screen/GPU and battery issues. T490 is fine for now, X1 Gen11 has crappy battery and is overheating from the get go. These are different generations, different lots and still affected by the same constant issues.

Debian has been amazing for my fleet of geriatric ThinkPads… my T60 and X200 are my favorites to use.

Have you maybe configured it to search online or something? I have used TB for years and still use it daily, daily getting some 30+ emails, that I tag and sort into folders and all that. My TB profile is several GB in size. Search is instant for me, on all my hardware, including older laptops and even an old X200, with some upgraded parts. I am not sure how it could be slow, so I am guessing something like your search needs to look for things online maybe, instead of in small inboxes and local folders.

It must really vary by person or environment; the only reason I'm not still daily driving my x200 ThinkPad from 2008 is that it's just too slow.

I have a T490s from last year for work. I just had the keyboard (well, entire top assembly) replaced today via the on-site warranty because the touchpad was ghosting and the physical buttons had stopped working, i.e. it was basically impossible to use without an external keyboard. This also meant that the left shift key no longer comes loose all the time, which it started doing soon after I got it. It also has a couple of dead pixels, though I don't care too much about those. Battery life at this point is less than one hour, after which it cuts out with no working. That might be a Linux issue, but the battery reports its charge state at ~25% when it cuts out. I had hoped they would replace it as well, but my work didn't get the extended warranty for the battery, which is a separate thing. That means that the warranty is only one year, and as such Lenovo want 300 EUR or so to do the replacement, and that's if I send it to them (onsite I imagine it'll be even more expensive). All in all, I'm not very happy with the machine. Overall feel is OK (not fantastic), but the random shut-downs and keyboard wonkiness are extremely off-putting, as is the development in the battery life - it barely works as a laptop anymore. My personal laptop is an almost antique X200, I've gone through a couple since 2008, but they always feel dependable in a way that this just doesn't, and I can't see myself getting a new Lenovo now based on this experience. In my personal life I don't need the extra sp