Laptop upgrade

[tufty]

So, my old thinkpad X220 has got really tired. It's on its second fan, and that's making nasty graunchy noises. Half the keyboard only registers when it feels like it, and the screen is getting a bit tired as well. It\s been a cracking little machine, and running it as a hackintosh has been great (apart from the few niggles like not getting USB3 up and running, and being stuck back in the dark ages of 10.13.6 maximum). So it's time to move on up, and retire the little beast. It's done pretty well for a machine that was discontinued in 2011.

Come in, Thinkpad T480s.

i5 T480s, 16GB memory, 1TB crucial SSD. Like the X220 but a bit bigger and a shitload better. Hackintoshed and running Ventura for the moment - everything seems to work although I haven't tried setting up Thunderbolt yet. For 250 quid including a new SSD, you really can't go wrong.

[noodles]

I have an old 13' Lenovo Thinkpad as well that's getting on a bit from 2012.
It still works pretty well except for the keyboard which has the enter keycap missing as it was impossible to get it back on even though
nothing seems broken.

</laptop keyboard rant on>

"This laptop can handle the rigors of business travel, without falling apart. Like all ThinkPads, the T480 has passed MIL-SPEC tests that subject it to extreme temperatures, humidity, dust and vibrations. It has also undergone Lenovo's own bump tests."

It has the same chicklet keyboard with the flimsy super-fragile keyswitches as my old laptop. Somehow the keyboard, the most
used part of the computer in terms of wear and tear, doesn't get a mention. Is adding 4mm of thickness to a laptop
really too much to consider and not have a shitty keyboard ? I'd gladly pay an extra 100 euros and get a half-height mechanical keybaord
built in, but it seems that would make the machine a bit too robust and comfy for typing on.

</laptop keyboard rant off>

[Dio]

My laptop is lighter than my keyboard is (and my keyboard is just a bog-standard Dell, membrane rather than switches). I doubt you can make a good full-size keyboard style without adding a lot of weight.

[noodles]

I have a Cherry keyboard that weighs almost nothing, the switches themselves are extremely light, it's the metal backplate on the more
higher end desktop versions that make them heavy.

[skab]

I have a Cherry keyboard that weighs almost nothing, the switches themselves are extremely light, it's the metal backplate on the more
higher end desktop versions that make them heavy.

Every keyboard under 2kg is a fucking toy and has no place on my desktop.

(I just pre-ordered a 122-key reproduction Model F. Over 4kg.)

[skab]

In other news, the dedicated GPU in my MacBook Pro 2011 finally started to get flaky. That thing was part of a lawsuit and following warranty extension by Apple because the GPU failed within months, so it was just a matter of time and actually long overdue.

Luckily I can work fine with just the integrated graphics (and had done so for years now), so I finally got an FPGA programmer and a licence for the demuxer-firmware (or whatever you call that for an FPGA) that disables the GPU-switching-chip, so that the system will completely forget about that broken chip.

Unluckily during the programming process I had to pull down a reset line to get it to work. The problem was that I am a clumsy idiot and connected the wrong little SMD resistor to ground, I managed to find one that was connected directly to a 3.3V line. I had fan-spin for a second, then off. Tried again, because why not, same. Tried again, there's hissing and a cute cloud of magic smoke. Machine still boots up, but all connections to the outside are gone, USB is dead, WiFi, Ethernet... A tiny little MOSFET that is switching that power line had blown up, there's even a little crater on the package.

Just got the spare part and will solder it in this week, hoping that it was just that MOSFET that sacrificed itself as a fancy fuse. If I'm lucky this old battleship will serve me for a while longer. One of the best computers I ever had, besides this annonying birth-defect of a crap GPU combined with a weak cooling system.

[Cloudane]

Loved the X220. Still got it but rarely use it

I went for T490 which is my daily driver now. I think my reasoning over T480 was either USB-C or something with the fingerprint reader, I can't remember. My only regret is the woeful battery life of 2 hours max under Windows and no ability to swap it. But I have vastly improved it by running PopOS instead 99% of the time (gets me at least another hour out of it if not 2) and a very nice 50000mAh power bank I bought for when I do need a bit longer.

[snaff]

I have an old 13' Lenovo Thinkpad as well that's getting on a bit from 2012.
It still works pretty well except for the keyboard which has the enter keycap missing as it was impossible to get it back on even though
nothing seems broken.

</laptop keyboard rant on>

"This laptop can handle the rigors of business travel, without falling apart. Like all ThinkPads, the T480 has passed MIL-SPEC tests that subject it to extreme temperatures, humidity, dust and vibrations. It has also undergone Lenovo's own bump tests."

It has the same chicklet keyboard with the flimsy super-fragile keyswitches as my old laptop. Somehow the keyboard, the most
used part of the computer in terms of wear and tear, doesn't get a mention. Is adding 4mm of thickness to a laptop
really too much to consider and not have a shitty keyboard ? I'd gladly pay an extra 100 euros and get a half-height mechanical keybaord
built in, but it seems that would make the machine a bit too robust and comfy for typing on.

</laptop keyboard rant off>

I have a t490s with broken enter and backspace keys. I installed keyd - https://github.com/rvaiya/keyd and mapped

caps lock to ctrl
ctrl-j to enter
ctrl-h to backspace

standard combos in terminal but now they work everywhere. No more long commutes for the little finger.