Lenovo Thinkpad x220i

Some time ago, I switched over from Dell Latitude 4310 to a used Lenovo Thinkpad x220i.

The Dell charger started to give trouble, so I changed the charger and eventually that one gave trouble too. It turns out there's a signal transmitted from the charger, and if the computer does not find the signal it throttles the processor speed and prevents the battery from charging.

There's a grub fix that prevents the throttling from happening, but it doesn't help with the charging problem. The fix might even prevent the processor from boosting. I also found there is a hack around the one-wire protocol used in the charger, but it seems a bit beyond my time/equipment/skills to be honest.

In addition, one of the USB ports started to show contact problems so I was quite motivated to move on. The Dell was by no means a bad computer for a Linux Mint install, it served me for quite many years.

I had the opportunity to buy a comparable laptop for less than 100€.  Moving over to another, similarly specced laptop, now that some time has passed I felt it would be nice to try to list the tradeoffs:


Lenovo on the plus side:

-I could move the SSD directly to the drive bay of the Lenovo, the Linux Mint boots fine from it. To be honest I might not have bothered installing yet another Mint and building my environment.

-I had 2 x 4GB laptop memory lying around that did not work properly on the Dell, these work on the Lenovo, a very nice bonus!

-The graphics hardware is somewhat better than with the Dell, it can be noticed for example in webGL applications. This doesn't make it a gaming lappy by any means, but at least web banner ads don't slow it down :O

-It's lighter and has smaller dimensions than the Dell. (I count the smaller screen a plus in this case)

-The Lenovo (probably) does not have that silly vendor locked charger thingy

-One more USB, and a USB port that supplies power even when the laptop is off.

-Slightly better/louder audio from the laptop speakers.

-A tiny detail, but like the positioning of the SD card reader better. It's on the right side, almost as if it were a floppy drive.

-Displayport


Lenovo glitches/downgrades:

-The processor (Intel® Core™ i3-2310M CPU @ 2.10GHz) is a tiny bit less capable.

-No webcam. In theory one could be fitted I suppose.

-Although apparently SATA3, the SDD demonstrated only SATA2 speeds so no improvement on that. This might not be the computer's fault, though.

-No CD/DVD drive. Not often used anyway, and an external drive works just as well so I'm not sure how big a "minus" this really is, it's dead weight most of the time.

-The keyboard is maybe not quite as good, it travels a bit more and is more susceptible to small particles. After a few months I've become used to it though.

-Something worries me about the touchpad. The scroll function ceases to work at times, although only at specific Chromium tabs! I've not yet got to the bottom of this, but it only came up after the laptop change so I'm listing it here.

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So, all in all a quite good exchange. The pluses are quite noticeable, whereas many of the negatives are not such a big deal or can be worked around. The Lenovo runs the same Linux Mint 18 Sarah 64-bit install as before. Both have VGA, RJ45 ethernet, SD card reader and headphone jack.