I need to upgrade my laptop and one of the things I’m looking for is repairability/upgradability. I’ve been told thinkpads are good in this respect, how true is that? In terms of replacing batteries and memory, at least. I’m also looking at the frameworks, but those black friday deals are looking alright at lenovo.

With that in mind, any particular series of thinkpad (L, S, whatever) I should look for? I’m hardline against nvidia but is there a reason to pick AMD over Intel (or vice versa)? They both are privacy nightmares, right? And there is no “good alternative?”

  • Björn Tantau
    6•1 year ago

    I have a T580 with nVidia graphics. Repairability is great. You can find a manual with step-by-step instructions for every part online.

    But the thermals in that thing are awful. Especially on Linux and doubly so with the GPU. It has some stupid on-lap detection which heavily throttles the system to not burn the user. Up until a few years ago there wasn’t a driver for Linux so it always defaulted to on-lap-mode. But even worse, the GPU has some hardcoded 70° limit and it throttles down to the lowest clockrate when it reaches that. And it reaches that quickly because CPU and GPU share a heatpipe.

    Nowadays I just run it on the integrated Intel graphics on Wayland and it’s great. But it would be cool if I could use the GPU that is at least theoretically able to run Doom 2016 at 30 fps. But practically it struggles with Quake 3.

    It’s just a shame that you probably won’t know about these kinds of problems on a new laptop because people only notice them after a few months to years.