This laptop is still miles better than those budget laptops under $250 on the market today.

I love it when I find out that the $75 laptop can run 10x as a better than a $250 laptop that cant even play minecraft at 10 FPS

This laptop is better then most Chromebooks now days

X220 is dream machine for office work really.... Ask all those thinkpad lovers if you don't believe me

Let me know if you guys like this kind of budget laptop content. Like I said in the video I plan to test this laptop with an External graphics card so if there is a specific game you would like to see me test leave it as a reply to this comment. *EDIT:* I'm having a lot of trouble with the eGPU dock and a replacement for it should be in about a week from now. This is what happens when I try to boot using the eGPU lol: i.imgur.com/Mh9og9g.gifv

I have the X220's successor, the X230. Almost identical except it has the chiclet keyboard (can easily be swapped with the X220's), USB 3.0, and a Mini DisplayPort instead of full-size, as well as the newer Ivy Bridge architecture. Just to correct you on something: the 2.5" drive bay supports SATA III speeds, it is the mSATA slot that is limited to SATA II speeds. Also, the batteries available for this ThinkPad were *4*-cell, 6-cell, and 9-cell, not 3-cell as you said in the video. The TN panel is VERY easy to upgrade. Just make sure to disconnect the battery and power adapter before swapping the displays. Also, if you want to check the battery health you can install "Lenovo Vantage" and go to the power manager. Compare the full charge capacity to the design capacity and you can calculate how much the battery has degraded. From my experience 3 hours with the 6 cell battery is decent, I think they could get closer to 4 or 5 hours when new. I have a 9-cell battery in my X230, and at 81% of its original capacity it lasts about 4 to 5 hours.

We use these at school. They claim that these cost £250 to buy new

All those upgrades were so satisfying while seeing the machine coming to life again. Thx for saving it!

I'm currently using this computer and it's great! It does EVERYTHING with no issues. Modern computers aren't significantly faster. It's easy to upgrade. I upgraded to an SSD and 16 gb ram. I run Windows 10 with out a problem, and run Linux and MacOX Sierra virtual machines without a problem.

I have an old HP laptop and the accessibility and reassembly literally left me speechless. Imagine _plastic rivets_

My friend has this exact laptop (except he has an i7-2640M), and I was super excited to see this laptop on the thumbnail!

Bruh, at 4:48 I can't handle the way you say futuristic

I can't wait to see how does it run with a egpu.

This laptop is great especially since you could get everything you need even a second battery and RAM upgrade for under $100. Also the docking station and easy eGPU support can be helpful.

I recently sold my HP Elitebook 2170p for a upgrade. The Laptop itself was superb. Touchpad and keyboard were awesome. It had keyboard light, was easy to maintain and could have had up to 16gb RAM. However, the Intel HD 4000 graphics was't up to the task for gaming. But 4k KZfaq ran smooth on a nice looking display.

Hi! I also have one of these! Excelent machine, I upgraded mine with 2 ssd drives, used also the m2 slot and a regular 2.5 inch SSD drive (which replaced the hdd), boosted ram to 12gb, replaced the wifi card and placed a new original Lenovo 6 cell battery... I simply love it.. I am also considering an external gpu to go along with it whenever I travel... Great video!

Thank you for this very instructive video. I was just asked by a friend about about getting a computer and my instructions now are "get a Thinkpad with a removable battery" and your video shows up on my watch list. Very concise and explains why folks should not really get some new piece of tat for a low cost machine. The getting deep inside and changing the paste and adding the boot drive was boss. In fact this may be the laptop I am looking for.. the last of the original keyboards? Shut up and take my money! Thank you again as it really saves me (and my listener) much time with a simple show and tell rather than a long speil. And of course Thinkpads are the way to go if you are a Linux user. (I persolally recommeod Pop! OS over Ubuntu personally for all around introductory use.. Especially now that 20.04 came out..)

Awesome stuff, I love messing with old machines like this too. Went way too heavy on the thermal paste though.

had this exact model for over 9 years! With a few upgrades, it still serves me well.

Good job dude. You did a good job changing the paste. Number one reason as to why people get rid of there laptops. I owned 2 Lenovo laptops and they were so good. I sold them both and they are still kicking.

It's not made from plastic, it's actually made from magnesium alloy covered in soft touch paint. I had the exact same ThinkPad. You can also do a display mod on this ThinkPad.

12:35 "bulletproof" hol up... I'LL TAKE YOUR ENTIRE STOCK

Excellent video. Thanks for being so clear and thorough about everything

Pretty hyped to see the egpu setup. Never dawned on me before, but I might try that myself on an old lenovo, so thanks!

Some great info for the newbies out there! All Sandy/Ivy Bridge with 2 ram slots support a max of 16GB ram(2x8GB). Most Sandy/Ivy bridge cpu are socketed, which mean you can upgrade the cpu. Most of these CPU's use Socket G2. The Quad Core i7 3610QM/3630QM uses Socket G2. Sometimes you can get a great deal by buying a dead Gaming laptop with an i7 3610/3630. Most times its the graphics card that is dead on the gaming laptops. I got dead Clevo for 40$(no ram/no hdd). Took the CPU(i7 3610QM), Sold the working LCD panel for 30$, sold my i5 3210M 30$. Just doublecheck the description of the dead gaming laptop, make sure you get the right cpu and the graphics is broken.

Dude, Matt, T420. Don't get me wrong, the X series are beautiful machines. I live and die by my X250 on the road, but the T machines are so much more upgradeable and easy to work with. The best $300 laptop today is a T420 that's been upgraded to a QM i7, maxed out RAM, an SSD and the 1080p screen

i have this laptop since 2017 and still rocking

this is the laptop I had growing up as a kid. it was still going strong when I replaced it. lots of good memories on this thing Cx

Lol, this games better than the $375 "gaming pc" oztalkshw bought on eBay

6:17 browsing this picture on a Chinese laptop :)

I have the tablet version of the x201 and I love it. With Linux installed it just flies.

You can go a bit further by using faster ram which always helps the igp as this generation of thinkpads have no issues using up to ddr3 1866, you can also upgrade the heatsink using the all copper cooler from the x230 which helps a little. As for the battery I recommend the 9 cell and there is the option of finding the slice pack which is basically another 9 cell that uses the docking port connector which can enable over 10 hours of battery life with ease.

Thank you for this amazing video!!! I loved every second of it. More models please!

Great video. Earned a sub :D. IPS screen upgrade would be interesting. I think a gtx 1050 would work well with that dual core. Is the IPS screen 720p as well?

Both your vid and your valknut on the background earned you a new sub bro

Excellent video. You certainly know your tech. Editing the vid is outstanding.

The power adaptor is just *T H I C C*

I had a older lenovo that was only dual core. The computer died a couple of months back. I ran Linux on it for years it came with windows vista. Your computer is a great deal Lenovo's are solid laptops. I want another one so bad. Going to get started looking on ebay. Lol *Great Purchase*

I have an i5 x220 with 64gb msata, 12gigs of ram & I'm about to shuck a 2tb Seagate slim hdd for it. Had it for 5yrs and going strong for classes and use in projects at home. Thanks for the tip on thermal paste, I haven't done that and it's been getting warmer the last year or so. Great video

I just love the accessibility of this thinkpad laptop

X220/230 are still amazing machines in it's class, especially if you going to use special edit way to upgrade it.(51NB made a X330p with i7-3612QE, 16G ram and 3*drives. FHD 99% sRGB 13.3in) it is on par with $1000 machine these days. It is even on par with X390

You should do a video about flipping every week do it for 3 months and see how much you make**

I am more interested in the equipment needed to add an external video card. Can't wait! Thank you.

I love the X series ThinkPads. Own a X60t and X240 myself of which the first sadly is 32bit but typing is gorgeous. Interesting to see Rocket League running off the iGPU though, didn't expect it to do THAT well.

Those laptops have a cult following. Just bought a x220t. So f__king amazing !

How much did it improve with an eGPU? How much FPS are ya getting now? Can you possibly make a video about it?

i bought one of these (the tablet version) and I love it, i use it for tuning my car and for mobile movie nights with friends, I upgraded the RAM to 2x8gb sticks for cheap, I bought the LEnovo 90watt power adapter which helps to keep the CPU from throttling when plugged in, and it charges faster. I also bought a legit 9-cell battery from ebay (the x200T's never came with more than 3 and 6-cell officially, but someone makes them) and I bought 2x slice batteries (1 for home and 1 for work) and I basically never have to charge this thing during the day even under heavy use it has 10-12+ hours of battery each day, amazing! DON'T FORGET, to install Thinkpad's software called Lenovo Vantage, it lets you modify lots of features, you can even set a charge limit on your batteries to help them last longer over time. I set mine stop charging at 85% capacity.

My favorite two of all my laptops, old and new alike, are the T420 and T430... Each swapped respectively with 4c/8t i7 qm variants, which can be done with a T series... unless its an S model usually. Brings them up to a standard FAR above the level of even $600-700 units today, with passmarks and cinebench scores that obliterate ultrabooks as well as business and work machines. Yet rarely consume over 15w... though keeping in mind they are now capping at 35w rather than 25... Also have 16gb 1866 in each. Never tossed an egpu in either of them, as gaming really isn't what they're for, though they can provide light duty gaming on the go with lighter titles, older titles, and emulation... as they are Sandy and Ivy bridge, respectively... so intel 3000 and 4000. Both are running SSD raid arrays, with phenomenal speeds... The 420 has the 900p screen, the 430 the 1366x768, or what, 768p? I dunno.... I'd like to swap it to a 900p as well. The 420 has the last of the amazing keyboards, the 430 goes chicklet, and as such I swapped in a backlit one... so it retains the thinklight, but now has a much more modern backlit keyboard as well...Looks great, and truly types VERY well for a chiclet style. It's a toss up which I like more to be honest, they both have massive merits and very little cons. New Amazon sourced batteries make for 6-8 hours on either of them, they are 14" units, and I also find them extraordinarily portable. They are robust, well made, and truly just put nearly anything today to shame. I have some other favorites as well, elitebooks with dream color displays, cpu's swapped, etc... but none have so much going for them the way the 420 and 430 do... X series are nice as well, don't get me wrong... but you're stuck with that poop cpu, and that just doesn't work for me... I need passmark's in or very near the tens of thousands... and that i5 just isn't close. It's fine and all, I'm sure it mostly is for most things... but heck, I can render video on either of mine, and it's not even a bad time. You know what, I did have an egpu via the wlan card slot on the 420, I forgot about that... this was before I had the 1070, 1080, or the 2070, and was running a gtx 1060 6GB... it had no issue keeping up with that card, with the card being the bottleneck up from 1080p to 4k... so the cpu was pretty stout for sure... Just that I have a 4930K pushing a 2070 on the main rig, which keeps up with the gaming needs just fine, so that was the last time i had the egpu dock out. It's in a drawer somewhere I believe. Either way, these are all of the best machines ever made...

Thinking of restoring a trashed x230 that I used in middle school....

Damn this is a really nice laptop for its price, I've seen a few of the same specs with a higher price tag

Dude, amazing video, as always

Superb video It's quite informational Keep it up and please post videos like this one every once in a while

Say what ?! My laptop is 350 and cannot even run cs go low graphics Not worth it

Installing Linux would make this computer even better, those Thinkpads were tanks and took to Linux very well.

I had this laptop and now i have the next model x230 i played more than 30 games on it, it's an amazing experience when u think about the price

Great video I love this laptop stuff. It's a bit different from the tower builds and upgrades

Makes me want to pull out my old think pad that’s collecting dust and update it.

I got my thinkpad t430 free a year ago and upgraded it, and I used to have the same laptop a few years ago and I did the same upgrades and honestly have been able to play Minecraft Windows 10 over the years with exeptional performance man I love used thinkpads being a cheap boi

Awesome stuff as always,still waiting on that e GPU build bro

I did this with my 6-year-old Lenovo g50 but took it to a technician cause I fucked up the screen when I tried installing the extra ram and didn't really know from where to get the windows system and how to install it on the new SSD. The upgrade was so worth it, very nervewracking for a nontech person to attempt the disassembly of the laptop, but now I know how to do it in the future with confidence. I highly recommend giving this a try if you are willing to be patient and you are interested in learning a lot.

I just got a thinkpad t420 and it's literally like this soooooooo good

This is a very nice video. A lot of good information. I would be a fun project to replace for LCD display with a used IPS panel for fun.

I've been considering doing this exact same kind of upgrade to my old laptop. It too has an ExpressCard port, but the CPU is sort of lacking. It's an i3 330m, but the socket can support an i7 620m which is actually exactly the same performance you'll see on this 2410m. Only thing I considered doing differently is using the mSATA port for an eGPU and using the ExpressCard port for USB 3.0 ports.

@Tech By Matt Thank you for thi video. I own a X220 myself and there is a really good modbios out there. You can use DDR3 up to 1866MHz which increases the overall speed and the gaming performace. you can go for 16GB aswell. I bought it used in 2014 for just 115€ including shipping, with 4GB, a 320GB HDD and the TN panel. I played Spec Ops the Line the last days with DDR3 1600MHz and optimized settings. To get rid of throttleing I used liqid metal. That decreased the the core temp by 20°C. I also own a eGPU but have never used it for a long time. NVIDIA GPU's are working way better.

I was able to get a Thankpad 420 for $75 using a friend's employee discount. I had to install the OS.

Holy shit... You bought that laptop from my dad... He hated that thing and his work gave it to him and didn't want it back. He had to deal with it for 4 or 5 years at best.

got a few of these at work, would be fun to play around and upgrade

Great video. I recently acquired the X201 Tablet I am typing this on.

"12 V Power Input", shows 20V port

I had the 9-cell battery for my t420 and it would last almost 10 hours... this was in 2009

In Belgium in 2017 I bought a HP Elitebook 8460p with a i5-2520M CPU for €170. I like the machine and I directly upgraded it to 8 GB (€25) and replaced the 320 GB HDD by a 1 TB SSHD. The most important update was, that I replaced Windows 7 by Ubuntu Mate 18.04.2 running from the ZFS file system. Most datasets (folders) including the root are LZ4 compressed, while archives are GZIP-7 compressed. The ZFS memory cache is between ½ and 2 GB, which means, that after a short time, the system or Virtual Machine runs completely from memory cache. Cache hit rate are above 90%, so the system is very responsive. Basically the system runs a 3-level storage hierarchy (2 GB Memory Cache, 8 GB Solid State Cache and 1 TB HDD). Note that everything including the caches are kept LZ4 compressed , almost doubling both effective cache spaces and the disk space. It is like having StoreMI on a 2011 laptop. Planned upgrades are 8 GB to 16 GB. Next year I like to replace the 2-core I5 by a 4-core I7, but that i7 price has to drop considerably. Afterwards I might add another 1 TB SSHD, dumping the DVD, if the SSHD prices are right. I would stripe (raid-0) both SSHDs :) More plans than money, but this year I concentrate on my desktop replacement from Phenom II X4 B97 to a Ryzen 3 2200G, ~doubling my desktop CPU speed (and memory).

Your videos are very different amd unique and thats what I like about them.

4:48 Futuristic? You'd be surprised to find out that the fingerprint reader was available on some versions of the T40p Thinkpad model. That was in 2003! I

Just to let you know that I have its main competitor at home (Samsung NP400B2B) and it's as good as this Lenovo ! The WXGA screen has perfect viewing angles and the i5-2450M paired with 8Gb of RAM and a 500Gb Samsung SSD holds up pretty well even in 2019 ! I might be cheating a bit, I'm using Debian 10 on it, but still !

My school gave me a Dell latitude e6400 atg for free in order to get some school work done. I literally upgraded everything I possibly could on that laptop and she runs very well. List of parts I upgraded: CPU (Intel core2duo p9700 @2.80ghz) RAM (2gbs->4gbs->8gbs of DDR2) 250gb SSD WIFI/Bluetooth card: Intel ac7260

i wanted to buy the same one and i ve got a guide for upgrading thanks matt

It has a specific portion for egpu, Thats impression!

I've bought my laptop for nearly 600$ in 2013, it's 2019 now, it can't even run csgo at a consistent 30fps

I didn't expect you to use the express card slot, let alone for a GPU, shot caught me off guard

I scored an "un-tested" Asus G74SX, a similar era PC, for free...turns out all it needed was a new HDD / SDD,, a new battery, and a 150W charger...it came with an i7 2670QM, I added 8GB or RAM or 16GB...and the included GTX 560m 3GB is a decent competitor to a more modern laptop IGPU. I actually plan to upgrade the display too, as there was a 1920x1080 with high refresh rate, either 100 or 120hz, can't recall. All in all, it's been a fun project to resurrect, even though I rarely use it.

plz tell me how can i find this card for external graphics card you dont have a name to find it in 3:25

My battery dies in like 2 hours that is a gaming laptop for yea

I bought my mom a x220 just like this it had the IPS panel and its very impressive.

I used this laptop for about three years.. The thing is a beast for what it it. I paid 100 for it and 100 for ram, ssd and bigger battery was really happy with the machine.

Men. thats alot of thermal paste

Lenovo makes good laptops hands down.

Yesterday I got an E431, which is a bit newer but not as durable, has the newer keyboard, doesn't have physical buttons above the the trackpad, but I'm ok with it because it was incredibly cheap in my country compared to even other Thinkpads. I actually wanted an X230, but it was more than double the price. Right now it's got an i3 3110m (in a few years time I'll upgrade to an i7 3632QM), 8GB of ram and a 500GB hard drive. I bought a caddy adapter, and when both the caddy and the laptop arrive, I'll be taking a spare 120GB SSD I have in my PC and putting it in the laptop and it will become a mobile beast for about $170 dollars total (adding the price I paid for the SSD two years ago and converting from Brazilian reals). It probably would've been half the price in the US, but I'm still super happy an excited for the upgradability. The keyboard seems to be very good either way, too, even if the older ones are better. Update: keyboard is pretty nice (yeah, it's the chicklet one), the trackpoint is much better to use than any trackpad I've ever used and I got used to in the same day I started using it. The trackpad is quiete bad, but not the worst I've ever seen. It's super snappy with the SSD and performance is very good. The fingerprint sensor is a great addition, too.

One thing to do is to upgrade the bios to allow fast memory again. The current bios only allow Ram speed of 1333mhz and the unofficial bios unlock it to 1866mhz also it removes the whitelist so you can install any wificard you want.

this lapotop 100x more cool than any Fruit brand

That thermal paste application .. What'd this? The verge part 2 .. LMAO ~ 🤣🤣🤣

You should test WOT on it before and after and see the major differences in between all of the major graphics and all of the minor ones such as track marks, shadows, and just the little details in the surrounding

I worked on a thinkpad these laptop is really easy to work on

1:17 "My name is matt and I suck at typing and I think this keyboard is......................"? "I think this keyboard is good"? "I think this keyboard is horrible"? "I think this keyboard is a keyboard"? Oh, thought 5:20 would finally be the answer to my life question, but this time we only got to: "My name is matt and I suck at typing and I think this keyboard" hmm. "think this keyboard sucks" "think this keyboard is great"? I will never know.

... I was bidding on an X220T last night that was like $50. I knew I should've bid higher on that thing :/

I picked up a couple of i5 Surface Pro 3s for around 50 bucks each on ebay. Most surfaces have had a pretty easy life in offices and you can just buy a new keyboard cover if there's any signs of wear. Perfect for kids to use when travelling as the battery life on them is 6h+ and the screen quality is better than most laptops!

I got a X230 for 120EUR that I upgraded to 8GB of ram and an SSD, I gave it to my dad. Using an X250 myself atm, which is actually a little bit slower but has much longer battery life.

whats the max egpu card you can use with this laptop?

Try League of Legends! This laptop is better than mine :'(

Bro the exact same device x220 the only thing I used to love about it is the high quality of the tv series I used to play on it I was a movie freak and it served super well.

these and dell 6300 6400 series are the best budget laptops. I use a 1650 with mine when I travel to game at a hotel through the laptop monitor. Thanks optimus.