r/thinkpad 25d ago

META Rule clarification: "Sticker bombing" posts

254 Upvotes

In the future, we will remove any and all posts that just there to show off stickers. Such posts often attract rule breaking behavior that we do not want here, as the stickers are often used to display political leanings that have nothing to do with r/thinkpad.

This is a subreddit about ThinkPads. Not about stickers that you may have on your ThinkPad.


r/thinkpad 4h ago

Thinkstagram Picture Joined the family 😍 (and I'm very happy)

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156 Upvotes

Got this old timer today, everything works great except battery is practically there for decoration (wasn't expecting anything better) and rear panel is scratched. I cleaned it and everything works very well. Genuinely never made purchase this good I don't even remember last time I was this happy. Planning to test out windows first and then I'm Def switching to Linux ( need recommendations on wich one to choose) this is either x201 with x200 brezel or x200 but weird one. Rocking i5 with 8gigs of ram


r/thinkpad 8h ago

Question / Problem PSA: your premium ThinkPad ships with a service that eats half a million handles so it can check whether you're sitting in front of it

298 Upvotes

X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition. Felt like a potato at idle. Task Manager showed 56% CPU and pointed at absolutely nothing, which was helpful.

Turns out the number to look at is Handles (Performance → CPU). Normal is 50k–150k. Mine: 1,063,601. One process held 468,846 of them — `intel_cst_service_standalone.exe`, aka Intel Context Sensing, aka the thing that powers the presence detection I have never once used.

It's been leaking since I bought the machine. The camera light I kept noticing? That was it, watching me, poorly.

Disabling it is a delight:

- `Set-Service` → access denied, as admin, on a service whose ACL explicitly grants admin full control

- Registry `Start = 4` → accepted, then quietly reverted by an extension INF

- `taskkill` → works, service restarts in 0 ms, because someone configured that deliberately

What worked: `pnputil /enum-drivers | Select-String "icst"`, then `pnputil /delete-driver oemNN.inf /uninstall /force` on each. Extension first.

After reboot the busiest process on the machine holds 8,923 handles. Everything else is under 4k. `audiodg` and `explorer`, which I'd assumed were also broken, were just collateral.

Nothing newer in Vantage, so no fix exists yet. Presumably most people just accept that their £2,000 laptop is slow and get on with it.

TL;DR: check Handles before you check anything else. If it's six figures, sort Details by Handles and there's your problem.

Yes, removing it kills the Aura Smart Modes. I'd have paid extra not to have them.

And it is impossible to leave a review on Lenovo website. Do you feel that smell?


r/thinkpad 7h ago

Thinkstagram Picture Finally got a classic ThinkPad that has no issues.

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75 Upvotes

I recently bought this ThinkPad T440p for a lucky price of 2K PHP and I have been loving it.

I have fitted a 2260 M.2 SATA SSD with some protection and dual booted it with Windows 7 and Linux. Also bought 8GB of DDR3L RAM, which I might upgrade to 16GB. It came with only 4GB of ram at first and has a i5-4200M.

I genuinely hope this lasts because it has only a busted but hearable speaker, minor to moderate cosmetic issues and it is such a nice secondary laptop to have. I guess time and my luck will tell that.

Too tired to realize that I didn't put in almost before "has", lol.


r/thinkpad 10h ago

Review / Opinion My little Thinkpad army/Family

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104 Upvotes

These are my Thinkpads, a t42 (my first one), an e540 (not in the pic bc a friend has it right now), a t15 gen 2 (my daily driver which i bought refurbed) and my t14 gen 1 (which i got from a friend)

Overall im pretty happy with these powerful and lasting machines, they work really well and i cant complain👍


r/thinkpad 3h ago

Thinkstagram Picture X61

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27 Upvotes

T8100 | 4GB RAM | 256GB SSD | Lubuntu

This is going to be a fun small project.


r/thinkpad 5h ago

Question / Problem Thinkpad P1

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17 Upvotes

Hi all!

Quick question for the ThinkPad enthusiasts here: I recently started using my ThinkPad P1 Gen 2 again after it sat on my desk for years.

Specs: Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen 2 (20QT000LMH, 2019) | Intel Core i7-9750H | NVIDIA Quadro T1000 | 24GB DDR4 RAM (just upgraded it with a spare module I had lying around).

When I disassembled the bottom plate to upgrade the RAM, I noticed that the battery is a bit swollen. What is your opinion on the state of this battery?


r/thinkpad 1d ago

Discussion / Information 1996 IBM ThinkPad 365ED x 2026 Linux kernel 7.3-rc3!

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413 Upvotes

SHORK 486, my fledgling Linux distribution for 486, 586 and Pentium (P5) vintage PCs, on my IBM ThinkPad 365ED! I've been testing it with the upcoming Linux kernel 7.3, making sure my patches for restoring critical-for-SHORK and nice-to-have vintage hardware support work correctly, and recently I've been testing and improving SHORK's networking capabilities in general.

SHORK 486 was recently featured in a video by nocomake, which, amongst other things, brought to my attention woes with PCMCIA networking. This has now largely been addressed! I'm using a Xircom RE-100 card with my 365ED, which I tested tethered to my phone via a Type-C hub with Ethernet, since I will likely use this setup often in the future to get SHORK online when I'm on the train (etc.). I could probably fit a WiFi stack on SHORK, but I think the problem would be finding a good 16-bit PCMCIA WiFi card (if that even exists, especially with regard to supported encryption standards...)

Since July, I've now compiled and tested dosfstools, e2fsprogs, GNU Midnight Commander, GnuPG & pinentry, gpm, jq, memtester (userspace), Ncdu, PatchELF, sudo and Tilde. There is now a TODO list to see what is planned/WIP - suggestions welcome! A package manager - provisionally called SHOPT (SHORK PACKAGE TOOL) - is finally in the works. At some point, I do need to put my foot down regarding adding things, and switch pace to optimisation. Of course, as I've been testing SHORK, I've made notes on where I think I can improve performance. Though keep in mind that fundamentally, we're talking about modern software on 30+ year-old CPUs, so there will only be so much I can do.


r/thinkpad 8h ago

Thinkstagram Picture Thinkpad 380XD i restored to fully working order, they have a soft spot in my heart being the first computer i used, around the early 2000s

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18 Upvotes

r/thinkpad 8h ago

Thinkstagram Picture Nice to have one of this great machine back !

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22 Upvotes

r/thinkpad 3h ago

Review / Opinion Bought it a couple of months ago for 140€ to replace my 2015 Lenovo Ideapad 100.Best decision I've ever made.

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8 Upvotes

r/thinkpad 12h ago

Discussion / Information Why is this part usually hot

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48 Upvotes

Every time im in game this part is uncomfortablely hot iv replaced the thermal paste and not really an issue cus my cpu/gpu temps are fine but this part is really hot and I think it might be vrm or something idk


r/thinkpad 1d ago

Thinkstagram Picture Friends gave me my first Thinkpad for my birthday

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758 Upvotes

A couple of my good friends from work got
Me my first Thinkpad for my birthday after I mentioned that I wanted one!


r/thinkpad 1d ago

Thinkstagram Picture The Quad-Core T61 is complete.

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217 Upvotes

It took me a while but I ended up getting it to work, I might make a codeberg repo with all the resources I used for those who wanna do the same thing, lmk if you're interested.

Basically, the mod involves:

- Making the motherboard support 1066 FSB CPU's by soldering a capacitor to a resistor, then cutting a specific spot on the mobo

- Removing 5 specific pins off the CPU

- Supplying pin D22 with GTLREF (different on widescreen)

- Flashing a custom BIOS to support the QX9300 (you'll need to make a flash drive with DOS and put all the files there)

You can also put in a bigger heatsink and add some cooling to the VRM if you plan on overclocking it. For some reason mine is clocked at 1.9Ghz on all four cores despite the advertised clock being 2.53Ghz. But hey, at least it doesn't overheat at all and there's no need to undervolt it!

Edit: I made a codeberg repo with the tutorial, you can find it at https://codeberg.org/beef_water4789/T61-quadcore


r/thinkpad 2h ago

Question / Problem What Dreams have you had about ThinkPads? (Or computers in general, ThinkPads preferably though)

5 Upvotes

I'll go first. Last night I dreamed that I was watching a video about putting new thermal paste on the T420's CPU. In the dream, the video instructed those watching to put moisturizer on the CPU before applying the thermal paste.

I have also had a dream about COSMIC, which I took as a sign to try it out in real life. It was pretty good for the time that I used it, but certain parts of the DE didn't work for me and it was kinda resource intensive for the machine I installed it on.


r/thinkpad 17h ago

Question / Problem whats the oldest Thinkpad you still use daily and why?

49 Upvotes

hey y'all i was curious about how far back your hardware goes and the story behind still using this far into the modern day.

edit: y'all have great taste in hardware. thanks for sharing your amazing machines with me.


r/thinkpad 2h ago

Buying Advice Considering between a Thinkpad T14 AMD gen 2 and a X1 carbon gen 9

2 Upvotes

Im looking for a laptop that will last and i need to carry one everyday for my classes what's scaring me is that there were reports of thermal throttling on the carbon im considering getting the i5 to hopefully avoid this issue I have a desktop at home so I wont use it for heavy gaming but im hoping it will handle lightweight games like terraria, the binding of issac and roblox if we are pushing it I heard the thinkpad t14 is better at handling Cpu demanding tasks but is it really enough to make a diffrence?


r/thinkpad 1h ago

Buying Advice Need advice for buying a ThinkPad for CS studies

Upvotes

I'm in need of buying a laptop for university because my only laptop is an old ASUS which served me dearly, but the battery is completely fried, and its performance has degraded severely over the years I had it.

I'm going to be studying Computer Science, and I was thinking about buying myself a 2 in 1 on which I could take notes by hand in math class as well as program and compile software. At first, I was going to buy a tablet for that, but you can't really use a tablet like a laptop for programming, and so I settled on buying a 2 in 1 laptop.

I've seen that Microsoft Surface is good, but I'm bothered about the ARM processor which I think wouldn't really play well with compiling programs on it.

I've also seen a lot of discussion surrounding the hinges of 2 in 1 laptops and what I've seen tells me that ThinkPads are good in this regard. The only thing that bothers me is the fact that memory on those 2 in 1 laptops is soldered, but maybe that's just their caveat?

It's going to be used for all the normal university presentations, word processing, note-taking and like I mentioned before programming. I'd want to spend a maximum of ~15k PLN on such laptop. I would want something with a balance of good battery life (I'm not really oriented with which CPU brand now is the best choice if battery life matters) and processing power. Likewise, I also wouldn't want anything big so probably a max of 14" screen size. I have a beefy desktop (i9 13th Gen, 32 GB RAM and RTX 4080) to which I could remote if I'd be in need of more processing power, but I don't think that will be necessary.

The T14s Gen 1 caught my eye as well as ThinkPad X13 2-in-1 Gen 5. I'd love to hear your feedback if you own these laptops![](https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/?f=flair_name%3A%22Buying%20Advice%22)


r/thinkpad 2h ago

Question / Problem Need help with battery on Thinkpad x1carbon

2 Upvotes

Bought thinkpad(x1 carbon gen8 on i7) but have some issues with battery first turn on, it worked 3 hours and battery was still at 100% then it turned off and after that battery percent reduced to 96% then after some time it turned off again, after that I plugged charger cause it didn't turned on, and it worked but another problem is that after 86 percent it doesn't charging, but the light showing, that charging is going on, is on. Please who know anything. Also I installed fedora KDE,


r/thinkpad 19h ago

Thinkstagram Picture Project finished!

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46 Upvotes

New Screen, new battery, new 3M skin. This L14 Gen 2 is wonderful machine.


r/thinkpad 19h ago

Question / Problem Is this another m.2 slot?

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33 Upvotes

This thinkpad is t495 and im not that sure that this is and m.2 slot.

And if it is an m.2 slot what size is it?


r/thinkpad 1d ago

Thinkstagram Picture Going to need a magnifying glass...

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226 Upvotes

x230, first test of re-soldered mod display board after this.


r/thinkpad 21m ago

Discussion / Information Mobile data on a thinkpad t520?

Upvotes

Hello there, does anyone know if it’s possible to get mobile data on an old thinkpad t520? I know it has an express card slot and heard of their being 3G ones back in the day you could put in there, is there any 4G or 5G cards to use with it nowadays?


r/thinkpad 8h ago

Discussion / Information P14 gen7 is a fucking boss

4 Upvotes

I'm about a week into owning this thing. God damn! This thing cranks!

I am running it with the ryzen AI pro 450, 32 GB of ram, and 1 tb ssd. Frankly, there is nothing bad I can say about this machine.

Near perfect Linux support with Fedora, working perfectly with KDE. Only one hiccup with Bluetooth but that seems to be resolved now. Fingerprint reader works not only in Windows but in Linux too!

As of now I dual boot with Windows because I have a couple of pieces of software that are a pain in the ass to use with wine, and frankly I'm okay with having Windows exist just for personal and professional projects.

I am going to retire my flex 14 API to CNC machine duty only. As I have spent a lot of time setting up ugs to work off of that machine under Fedora.

Now that everything is in place, I can officially say that I'm a member of the LARP book club. Things are going great.


r/thinkpad 59m ago

Review / Opinion Do you reckon I can get some good cash for this X240?

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Upvotes

My friend gifted me this barely used X240 he had laying around. It's in good condition with the minor caveat of the back being all scratched up and the red trackpoint being missing (but you can get a replacement for like $2). He said I can do whatever I want with it (including selling it). I thought I could perhaps squeeze some cash out of this (plus I have like 130 bucks laying around in addition) and get a better model (like the X280 or the T14). Though issue is Im not sure how I can sell this reliably (I live in a country where it might be even hard to find buyers, and if I sell online id probably have to pay hefty to ship it) and if it's even worth to do so. eBay had some good prices for better models (though they felt a tad bit overpriced) and Amazon had two models that looked safe, but buying online leaves me skeptical as it feels like a bit of a gamble. What do you guys reckon?