Thinkpads Forum

I'm about to pull the trigger on 40 second hand 14" X1 Carbon gen 2 (with the touchbar) i5-4300U/8GB/256SSD laptops for our fleet at about a $500 price point.

For us the 14" touch screen is the primary draw at this price point. It will be mostly used by elementary students, so not likely to need heavy processing power.

i already do extensive repair/replace on our other Lenovos (G570s, they are horrible), and my personal T61 (it is awesome!) is completely refurb'd by me. I anticipate doing the same with these after our 3y warranty expires (yes, the reseller is offering 3 years). What are the problems I should expect to be dealing with on these units?

I am particularly worried about the touchbars going out - which would mean loss of a couple of keys (INS, etc) that are not on the physical keyboard (also why I anticipate elementary kids will have less issues in the worst case).

Thanks guys!

Motherboards, motherboards. There seems to be a defect in the first run. Motherboard part numbers changed a new after the first year or so.

Did I say motherboards?

That and maybe some faulty USB ports and batteries too.

Never had a touchbar fail. Had a bad digitizer on one touch screen.

That is my experience.

The three year warranty is very generous in my book.

Brad

Everything, motherboard screen keyboard battery you name it, it has a problem with it. I think the X1 C2 is a machine from the devil. They got the keyboard from a macbook and mashed it with a touchscreen scientific calculator. The screen DSTN with slider controls on the lcd thing. Battery is probably nicd. Atleast old thinkpads had a reason for this and they were still good, but not the x1. Got the processor from a pentium mmx and the buttons for the trackpoint from casio watch.....

Rant is now over...

For now.

Sent from my E6553 using Tapatalk

Hmmm. Sounds like my decision is between spending $500 for 3 warranty years of expected life, V.S. spending more like $700 on a new product and probably squeezing 5 years of life out of it. I love the idea of putting older gear into productive use, but I'm starting to feel like the new laptop route is the most responsible use of funds.

Our desired specs are: 14-15" touchscreen, Windows device (I need these devices to be flexible enough to run some legacy Win software) i5, 8GB, at least 128GB HDD (SSD not required).

Cheers,

Step one, cross out anything yoga..
Step two...(insert step two)

Sent from my E6553 using Tapatalk

I had bought a batch of 'as is' motherboards from an X1C2 lot before, I think about 8 of them.
iirc, 5 of them had bad RAM installed, irreplaceable due to soldiered on RAM.
2 didn't see the hard drive installed
The one working one wouldn't turn on without the AC adapter plugged in at first, but would be fine afterwards.

Not much of us here had gotten this unit.
I am more of a fan of the X1C3, which is what the X1C2 should of been (imo the clickpad was worse than the keyboard).
It wasn't that bad, I kinda liked it...

We bought X1C4 and X1C3 instead.

Specifically, we avoided buying the X1C2 (Gen 2, circa 2014) because of these major keyboard usability issues:

1) X1 Carbon Generation (X1C2) had no left, no right, and no scroll buttons on top of the TouchPad.
Some ThinkPad users complained that you sometimes accidentally move the cursor when you click down on the TouchPad virtual Left/Right "mouse" buttons.

2) TouchBar replacing the physical Function Key row (user complained the slightest brush on TouchBar accidentally triggers the function keys).

3) Home/End keys replacing the CapsLock on the left side.
Like playing piano: Try pressing [Control]+[End] and then press [Control]+[PageUp] afterwards!