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 adjustments

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 configurations 🪛

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

What i have learned

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.