I refurbished a T440p! Or maybe the repairs are ongoing…

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Greetings fellow humans! I’ve been waiting a few weeks for some parts to come in for the T440p I’m upcycling and refurbishing, so someone else out there can continue using this bad boi. While I’ve learned a lot from my various tech support jobs and internships I’ve had during the past 10 years of my life or so, manually fixing modular hardware continues to be calming to my mind.

The current state of things, before rennovations. While this machine was probably one of my craigslist snags in the past two years or so, I found a somewhat-functioning Thinkpad Advanced Dock from a friend’s apartment complex’s e-waste area. That guy just needs a pin bent back into its proper slot and it should connect fine to laptops again. Pic of that below.

Lil pin boyo. If you look at the upper left of the connector, you’ll see the retaining pin that’s bent.

I also have some 8GB modules on hand for upgrading this T440p to 16GB of RAM. Going to give it an isopropyl wipedown next before I start swapping parts. This is the first time I took the CD-to-SATA adapter for this project out of its sleeve, and it looks like it came with a cute little screwdriver as well as screws! That’s cute :)

Changing laptop subjects real quick, above is the Thinkpad X230 I’ve had for a little while. It’s had a keyboard replacement, RAM upgrade, and the like. I will also be putting this up for sale at some point. I think I’ll replace the screen bezel (see bottom left corner) if it isn’t too costly.

Back on the T440p, I went ahead and replaced the CD drive with a SATA slot and a 240GB SSD. If you look real close at the little window-to-sdd-drive from the left of the RAM, you can see that PNY SSD’s serial poking through. Upgraded the RAM to 16GB as well, and swapped out the old 7000 series Intel wifi card for their newer AX201, which should be Wifi 6 compatible. This is shaping up to be a nice lil used machine! I’d say, prior to my moving to a Framework Laptop, this T440p and my subsequent P51 were the most modular laptops I owned.

Also, recently received a free backplate from a friend…but it turns out to have been hopelessly bent…and unable to go on the rear of the machine properly, regardless of bending it back with a vice.

Swapped that bad trackpad.

Here’s a shot of what that looks like from the bottom. As the machine wouldn’t boot with an AX201 card, I kept the original wifi card in there. Might have been due to some BIOS whitelisting. Also now two SSDS are installed!

Also added an i7-4710mq to replace the dual core i5 that was in there. I love swappable processors in laptops! Oh how I miss those days… I’m sorry for the blurry pic here! That was the only one I had before cleaning the rest of the dry thermal muck off, pasting it and screwing the cooler back on.

Since the original replacement back panel to this T440p I wanted to fix was quite bent, I’ve finally replaced it after weeks of waiting!

Here’s the test of Nobara Linux, technically Fedora 36 with newer stacks. As you can see here, the screen is damaged. Once I get a replacement 1080p screen to replace this damaged 768p one, I think I’ll list this project on my store soon.