Maximising my T440p - the progress so far

[MrDale93]

Its been a while since I posted here as I haven't been able to log in, but this is sorted now and I am back in.

Anyway, hello everybody, I've done one or two things since my last post so I'll recap for myself and for anybody reading, then you don't need to look for my post history if you are interested but don't want to look for my old posts.
Side note, I've just had a look at my first post and noticed both the punctuation and grammar are quite bad in that, I'm blaming the alcohol at the time of writing.

At the point of my last in detail post, I had:

• Been bought this by the women as a birthday gift after stating this was the laptop I wanted just after my previous one's fused keyboard stopped working.

• I took it home and cleaned the entire thing inside and out, and re pasted the CPU. There was some ink on the case, tried everything to get it off and got nowhere.

• Switched the 128gb SSD for a 1tb Crucial drive.

• Swapped the 1366x768 TN panel for a 1920x1080 IPS model. This in itself was a huge upgrade.

• Swapped the keyboard for the back lit model. Its quite a funny story how I got that, I may write that out in another post if folk want to read it.

• Removed the WWAN card and added a 16gb NVMe SATA drive. I had no idea what to use it for at the time, I've now set it up for my music collection. (Locally owned storage is far superior to streaming or renting.)

• Swapped the disc drive for a 2nd drive caddy and put the 128gb back on as a boot drive, I'm now using the 1tb for storage.

• Switched to Linux Mint Cinnamon, Arch was having issues when choosing my distro but I cannot do with Windows on my laptops - now the problems have been sorted I've finally switched to arch (btw) as this is my preferred distro by a mile. My first post was written around April and I am still on Arch...(btw).

I'd then written that I planned on swapping the button-less touchpad, ram, CPU, battery. After this I wanted to switch from my preferred thermal paste - Noctua NT-H1 to PTM -950, the extra couple of degrees cooling performance is worth it in my opinion. The idea of swapping the WiFi card remains interesting, but it requires flashing a custom Bios on to it and that feels like a lot of work for swapping one card that is more than fast enough for what I need. However, if I want to max this out as was my original plan then I may end up doing this. I'd also like to get the heatsink from the model with the dGPU built in but they seem both hard to find and expensive.


Since then, I've done some more work to this laptop. The new mods are:

• I swapped the original i5-4300M 37w dual core CPU running @ 2.6ghz boosting to 3.30ghz for an i7-4712MQ 37w quad core running @ 2.30ghz boosting to 3.30ghz. The i5 has 3mb cache, the i7 has 6mb. Its given a large performance increase across the board.

• Swapped the original Clunkpad button-less touchpad for the original 3 button ThinkPad Synaptics option from a T450. Its great, looks and feels better but I have an issue with it I'll be making a new post about.

• I've gone from 8gb (2x4gb) ram to 16gb (2x8gb). The 8gb kit was Samsung, the new is TimeTec. So far, so good even though this is a brand I haven't heard of before.

I still need:

• A 9-cell battery for this but I think this would be a complete waste of money at this point. The laptop works on battery power albeit for only around an hour depending on what I am doing, but I mostly use this whilst sat near a plug anyway so it feels like a pointless waste of money.

• The USB-C charging mod would be a great change, both for ease of charging, longevity and modernisation.

• After swapping the CPU to an i7 I need to get the Intel sticker that this processor came with, rather than the old i5 sticker currently stuck on it.

• The bigger heatsink from the model with the GPU for that extra cooling performance.

• A 1tb boot drive that is newer and of better quality. Samsung, Crucial, Kioxia etc.

Aside from the physical hardware work done so far, I've been working on making my Arch install tailored completely to me, my laptop, and what I want from it. I've spent hours learning how to make config files for a variety of different things, one of these being Thinkfan, a daemon specifically for ThinkPads that controls the fan speed in relation to the CPU temperature, but this introduced the issue of a shutdown taking ~30 seconds, so I made a config to have that service shut itself off 0.01 seconds after pressing shutdown, reboot etc. I only keep the packages I need and a few nice to haves such as games and launchers - Steam, Lutris, Heroic, etc. Steam link is set up so I can stream high quality games from my gaming desktop to the laptop, and that works surprisingly well on older hardware. The entire OS is backed up using Timeshift, saving to my storage drive rather than the boot drive, at least like that when I have the chance to swap to a larger boot drive.

Its been a busy time for me with this laptop and at one point I almost lost it, the car has been playing up because of course that cant just run as intended, and I have started my own work too which is going well right now, but I don't know how long I can make this last.
Hopefully things keep going right as that would be nice change of pace, I can continue to get this laptop to the point of being something that will last many more years and in a far more modern state, and hopefully people can give me ideas for other things to do to this, and maybe this can inspire people to do something themselves too.

Thank you for reading, I know this is a long post but hopefully it is of interest to somebody.