Thinkpads Forum

Hi.
Via a fairly complicated chain of events I am now the proud owner of 2 more thinkpads for my collection! And this is about one of them, an x201. By far the most modern and possibly fasted Thinkpad I own (in order of speed I have a T40, T43, X60 Tablet, X61, R500 and this!)

However, it was a bit grubby when it showed up...
https://flic.kr/p/2ex4DgD
https://flic.kr/p/SasJyD

No, I don't know what life it had led either! The guy ho gave it to me had had it since new, and just not cared about it. I was warned the battery was dead, and the CPU fan knackered/very loud.

I turned it on, and after spending 10 minutes watching it attempt to load the windows 10 install it had on, listening to the hard drive try and vibrate the thing off the table, I killed it and just went into the bios to see what I had

https://flic.kr/p/2eJh7qh

Very nice, a big step up from the other laptops I have. But I couldnt pick it up without needing to wash my hands afterwards, so from that, via 4 baby wipes and a microfibre cloth, to this

https://flic.kr/p/2ex4ANc

via alot of this on the keyboard

https://flic.kr/p/2fRpTG3

https://flic.kr/p/2eJgnRj

https://flic.kr/p/SasH68

Transformed into a very clean thinkpad with minimal damage!

I even got to peel the protective covering off the webcam

https://flic.kr/p/2fRpUG9

Marvellous! Because I don't want to spend any money on it yet until I've seen what works and what doesn't I grabbed a 64gb SSD I had lying around and put a fresh copy of Windows 10 on it, activated with the windows 7 key underneath

https://flic.kr/p/2ex4xrn

Which is where I left it before coming to work for the day, will use it over the weekend, run some stress tests to see if the CPU fan really is terrible and go from there.

Nice cleanup job on the poor thing.

And yeah, the SSD is a massive improvement over the HDD.

Monitor the temps. The X201 is a hot-running beast.

Your not wrong, typing this with just 2 tabs of firefox open the CPU is at 66 degrees! Fan is on quite high too, I can feel it vibrating the whole machine (it's the only moving part now...)

I downloaded the Lenovo software from the windows store, and found that the battery has 0.34% life in it... But it passed all of the lenovo benchmarks! Might run a passmark over it soon, then strip it down, replace the CPU fan (because as much as it might just need cleaning, I'm not having it apart and back together again to find out it didn't work), a re-paste of the CPU and a general clean up of everything and see how that improves matters!

But it is lovely, such a great form factor. bar the small wrist rest, I've been spoiled with my SK8845 at work and the R500 at home with acres of space, I'm finding my hands are at an angle here, or resting on the edge of the palmrest. Hoping I'll get used to it, otherwise this wont be a writing machine! (prefer the T43 for writing heavy build threads on though as it's keyboard is divine for reasons I have not worked out, lack of use probably!) Must find my new trackpoint covers too, this one is so worn my finger slips off and it doesn't track properly.

Everything worked out of the box too with windows 10, I was doing some googling earlier and all the threads I could find from when 10 came out were not very positive, things have improved alot and TBH I cannot tell the difference typing this between my i7 kaby lake horrible HP thing at work and this! My use will be quite light too so hopefully it'll stay that way (not about to start editing video or anything)

This is still going very well, been using it daily recently (poor R500).

Went shopping yesterday:

Used 16 cycle 9 cenn genuineb attery with a claimed 2+ hours life on the ebay add for £28
2x 4gb sticks of RAM for £10 each
1 new heatsink and fan assembly (non genuine I think but shows the right FRU number on the label) - £15 (posted from america though so wont see that for a while).

Accidentally bought an X201s fan assembly for £5 too though, oops.

Ran a passmark on it this morning for a laugh and got 709.0 as a score.

Battery seems fab so far, charging nicely!
https://flic.kr/p/2g6hgje

https://flic.kr/p/2g6hgiY

https://flic.kr/p/2g6hwYo

Happy with it so far for £28. It was missing a rubber foot so I peeled one off the old dead battery before lobbing it in the bin and stuck it on

Sill performing well?