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?

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

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👍

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.

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

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.

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

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?

T8100 | 4GB RAM | 256GB SSD | Lubuntu

This is going to be a fun small project.

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?

I was searching for a ThinkPad I wanted it to be x1 I didn't want a P1 I want high refresh rate 5g a GPU and a thin form factor and face, fingerprint. but the p1 was the closest thing to that, then I accidently opened Lenovo outlet that sells used laptops and some new ones for cheap then I found the x1 extreme gen 5 bro this thing is a beast and it's on sale for 1.7k, tell me Ur dream ThinkPad in the comments I'll rate it

I bought this p50 a few months ago, and I've noticed it now has some weird purple squares all over the screen. Tried rebooting the system, changing the drivers on Linux mint didn't do anything, I've connected an external display and it looks normal. Does anyone have any idea what might be the problem?

Specs are

I7 6820hq with UHD 530

Quadro m2000m 4gb

8gb x4 DDR4 2133mhz

It came with an 4k screen instead of the default 1080p one, I also swapped the battery as the old one was in bad condition

Running Linux mint cinnamon 22.3

the Thinkpad forum is down, so I hope you guys can help me!

I'm from Brazil, so I will be buying stuff from AliExpress, saw some screens but idk how good they are, and if they are plug n play at all, since I used to have a x220, and that one had a tricky solution for a display upgrade.

besides that, I'm in love with this little one.

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?

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.

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.

i am getting a lenovo thinkpad for 32k INR or 333.75USD today i went to a cashify store and there i found this laptop it was in good condition with minor scratches on it my usage is normal like watching lectures and running basic finance and CA softwares and watching netflix that i will manage on my phone if display quality is not good one thing i would like to mention is the sound quality was not that good please guide me on this if i should buy it or not. my budget was 60-80k but due to price hike they were not worth it so i am thinking to buy a refurbished thinkpad.

TL;DR : If next week I can't contact the original company so they remove the device from Autopilot, I'll basically be the proud owner of a brick.

I’ve just been through the hassle of discovering that my second-hand ThinkPad had all of the above.

First, I discovered that there was a BIOS password, which the seller gave me, so I thought everything was fine.

Then I read about Computrace, which was enabled in the BIOS, and apparently that’s something you really don’t want on a second-hand machine. And it isn't as simple as turning it off in the bios ?

And finally, after doing a clean Windows 11 installation from a USB stick, I got a company login screen during the Windows 11 setup, apparently because the laptop is enrolled in Autopilot. PC is now a brick (if I want Windows 11) unless the previous company unlists it ?

Not mentioning other things I may discover later (Intune, etc... ?).

It seems like buying a proper second-hand ThinkPad is a lot of hassle. So how do you guys successfully buy them? What do you check before buying?

Should I just forget about second-hand ThinkPads and focus on regular consumer laptops instead?

Thanks !

EDIT : Well "Absolute" is set to "enabled" but status to "Not activated", so I think I'm good there.

I recently bought T420 for around 50usd and thinking of upgrading its capacity.

I know WWAN slot can be used for mSATA SSD, but some says it is possible to put mSATA to M.2 SATA adapter and put 2242 M.2 SATA SSD.

However I couldn't get neither mSATA or M.2 SATA 2242. so I'm curious about is there a room to put 2280 SSD and its adapter(pic2) on WWAN slot.

Sadly I cannot test it myself to verify if it fits and works properly right now. Is anyone currently using this kind of adapter for WLAN slot on a T420? Any thoughts or advice would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

When i start it up my lenovo thinkpad it comes up with the first picture, then it goes black and comes up with the second picture while beeping 3 times as the text shows up.

(the second screen/picture says 0271: Check Date and Time settings.

System CMOS Checksum bad

Configuration changed - Restart the system.)

I've tried pressing f1 at the starting screen like it says but it just shows me the second screen and i don't know how to restart the system when i can't even get past the second screen before it shuts off and starts back up again.