My 2-Laptop ThinkPad History

Dec 18, 2025

Every party done effed it.

Haven't made a post in about—checks arm—161 days. Too bad since I wasn't active for much of that time, but ah well. I'm just a puppet.

But d'ya wanna know a little secret? Did you know that almost every single thing that has massive hype or people have a positive stigma about is almost always, in the end, a trainwreck in some ways? Because I've unfortunately experienced this beforehand.

Ruby, Wayland, every single Linux distro that claims to be "user-friendly"—and now I've realised ThinkPads are included in this rather truncated list that's actually a shitlist. Now, I could've had a better experience if we bought new, but the last "good" model was 7 man-screaming years ago, so I don't care.

Non-coincidentally enough, I'm currently typing this on a ThinkPad; rather, a T480 which I just said was "the last good model". I am now reconsidering my choices and would rather type this on my eitch-pea, if it wasn't for the fact that 2 keycaps happened to irreversibly slide off for no reason, and also because we put dents in its chassis by accident. Titanium bad.

The cover image is tangentially related to all this, but I'll get to it later. For now, though...

T460S

As an anteword for the rest of this: I did not expect full reliability, I just want something that worked.

Having just come out of poverty, this was (regrettably) an exciting thing to have, considering that this was our THIRD personal computer that we now had. Yay.

Now, we had the bright idea to buy this piece of shit off of Amazon Renewed. Can't get younger and dumber than that, because for some reason we didn't trust eBay enough for refurbished laptops yet due to lingering trust issues with everything.

Okay then, fair enough. Then we started using it. There were scuffs on the top cover, and both batteries were at ~55% capacity at the start. According to my memory at least, but goddamnit-fuck-shit. Either they're faulty, or it's the seller's fault. Due to the aformentioned, we didn't have enough money to buy new batteries, so we kept charging and discharging it ad nauseam.

You would've thought by now the battery would've exploded at that point. Wrong. Infact, the first thing was the battery port of all things starting to fall out of place due to our accidental yanking of the cord. We did not realise this, and thought that the cord was the problem. So we bought a new one off of eBay, OEM.

We thought we were correct, it charged fine for a while. And then it stopped, as it could only charge at certain angles. Then the end of the cord started fraying, so we taped it up. Then, one day, it stopped charging entirely. And then the cord just fucking melted. The smell of burnt plastic and copper was still in our room days after that. No more charging cables after that—we let the poor thing die and shelved it.

This is a theory we thought up in the car, but this was probably due to Lenovo having the splendid idea to use an entirely proprietary charging specification, which wasn't standardised, and therefore wasn't thoroughly thought out in terms of safety and sustainability, leading to this shitshow. Always just use USB-C, fix your heart or die if else.

So we kept using our eitch-pea, still pissy about any of this happening in the first place. A few months later, off of eBay, we bought a shiny not-new...

T480

This is the thing I'm typing on right now, y'hear? Well, not actually, I'm typing on a Keychron C2, but still. It's a beaut, nought the damn thermals and the weirdly built keyboard.

But we only bought these because of the positive stigma around them—a stigma mostly propped up by Reddit and fediverse users who don't respect their time. This was a mistake that we now have to live out until absolution, but it's a hard task to find out what notebook you want to buy regardless.

When we got the thing, it booted into a disgustingly stock installation of Windows 11, to which we immediately opened Lenovo Vantage and checked the batteries. Full capacity—good! But it lied.

So then we installed our distribution of choice at the time, EndeavourOS, then checked tlp-stat -b some time later. Both were at ~50% capacity. The batteries the seller put in were faulty, and even worse, we were still in the hole. We then just gave up using it, and ordered some new batteries months later.

And as we were taking the external battery out, it took a massive amount of pulling force to get it it out, as it was completely and utterly fucking bloated. But we replaced them both successfully anyways.

Left Shift Key

We bite our nails a lot, so naturally one would get under one of the keycaps of an ill-fated laptop. This one got under the above. We didn't know how to properly remove it at the time (and still don't), so we pulled it up the top and completely fucked it because every other cap is pulled from the top. We then removed it from the bottom corners using a flathead after it got stuck. Safe, so far.

We then had to put it back together. We could not. Apparently, you have to perfectly align the fucking keycap with the fucking dipshit socket and it'll magically be in there. I wasted 3 hours of my life on this shit, then gave up when one of the clamps holding the contacts on the keycap got magically removed as I was re-inserting the contacts a lot, and because it's fragile plastic.

I don't like membrane keyboards, but this is a rather egregious example (sans our eitch-pea). Generally, keys should be easy to replace and not a pain in the ass to work with, unless if there's a good reason for else. This wasn't that. Let me replace keycaps individually consistently, for chrissake.

Say, what would happen if I made keycaps out of anything but plastic? Maybe this wouldn't happen, hopefully.

So Now What?

i'm buying a tower computer instead next time end post. this entire thing is superficial but honestly i've had it