Overview of my Rebuild

New RAM/SSD

An older laptop generally runs better when you fill it with newer hardware!
I added 16gb of DDR3 RAM- which is quite cheap now- and a 1TB SSD to hold everything I use! My OS of choice is Manjaro Linux, though I may be switching to Fedora Silverblue in the future, to learn more about containerization and their ostree tech.

BIOS Whitelisting/Unlocking

For future projects, such as turning this laptop into a Macbook (Hackbook I call it) I needed to unlock the BIOS to allow for different non-whitelisted wifi cards by Lenovo. Click the button below to follow a video my buddy Wolfgang made on how to do it!

(Image refers to the chip that you would flash)

New Screen and Touchpad!

All that’s left to do is to replace the 1028x768 screen with an IPS 1080p one! TN screens are fairly bad, though cheap and easy to mass produce. I’ll do a lot of youtube watching, server administration and movie watching on here, so these are must.

The trackpad that comes with the T440p series of Thinkpads by default is a terrible Macbook-clone of a trackpad that doesn’t entirely serve its purpose well. Replacing this with one from the Thinkpad T450 series.

New Keyboard and CPU!

This model came with a slightly shiny keyboard (from grease) and a lower-end Core i5 with two core- upgrading to an i7 4800MQ and a fresh keyboard will help.

In the above screenshot, I have a finished minimal screenshot of Gnome on Fedora Silverblue 30. One thing I love about this distro is that the “rpm-ostree” command makes it incredibly easy to roll back to prior images before updates etc.

As of December 2019, I have switched the T440p over to the independently-developed distro known as Solus. No rollback features like what Fedora Silverblue has, but I enjoy trying out flagship distros for desktop environments, and Budgie is quite light!