Fix + refurbish x201 & X1 Carbon Gen1

[TKAF]

Hello Ladies and Gentlemen.

My broke life companion laptops have come broke. Ye olde X201 screen went dark with a magnificent flare, and ye X1 has a charger port issue.
My plea for You, fellow travaillers, is for You to inform me of the best available approach for a broke lifer to fix his poor laptops on non-zero budget.

The steps to achieve this noble goal are, I assume, to:

For X1:
Change X1 charger port. OEM part is available on Aliexpress.
But is there something better than to change the part to a new one?
Is there anything else I should consider with the charging problem?

For X201
Have someone of You tell me what's wrong with the X201. Yesterday it's screen suddenly started to go very bright on it's own, and today it was only very dark.
I assume it has some backlight problem? What to do? With an external monitor it works fine.
Also it has very little memory with 4Gb. Is there memory upgrade available on budget?
And it's battery is dead. I thought I'd build a refurbish the battery with six 18650's. Is that a good idea?

Thanks.

Tommy, from tk artisanal fabrication
(web shop coming soon)