My personal thinkpad journey

For my personal note taking process and projects i use a dell laptop that as served me pretty well in the current year, it has a pretty good build quality and specs but i’m scared to take it with me when i travel (i’m a off-campus student/worker) so i was looking for something sturdy that can handle falls and punches with no problem.

I recently get an old thinkpad T470 from work, is a good laptop with pretty decent specs (8GB ram, 256GB SSD, 4 cores 4 threads CPU) that makes it the perfect candidate for the job. So i decided to turn it into my travel/backup PC

the new backup PC at work

HARDWARE #

The laptop was dirty so the first step was cleaning off al the dust and plastics with isopropile alcohol, in the process i decided to swap out the disk with an SSD that i have laying around for a slightly improvement in performance (the old SSD appears to be slow as fuck for some reason)

the old SSD

After turning on the machine (and installing my personal arch dotfiles) i realized that one of the two batteries was dead (yes this think has two batteries, i was surprised too) so i decided to replace the internal one and keep the external that is still usable, after all is a backup PC

SOFTWARE #

After installing and configuring my dotfiles repo i was facing an issue with the battery usage, when the battery dropped below \(75% \) the cpu frequency dropped down to \(400MHz\), after some research i found that it was a problem with CPU signals and registries, the fix was to download this repo and runs the scripts inside to reset the cpu registry (if i understand the script correctly, it sets some value in some registry disabling some power saving mode in the CPU), in order to run the script at startup i wrote a bunch of files to create an arch package that installs the script and a Systemd target to run at startup

CONCLUSIONS #

i have used this thinkpad for about a week in my personal workflows (software editing with vim and neovim, obsidian note taking) and i must say that this old piece of tech has still a lot to say, i also try to stress it by writing a bash script to run multiple molecule tests in parallel (which means spawning a bunch of virtualbox vm’s and docker containers) and it wasn’t panicking at all.