ThinkPad x270

Hardware

So, until recently I’ve been using a Lenovo Ideapad 110s as my portable laptop. I have a larger Thinkpad, courtesy of my uni, that is more powerful, but at 14 inches it’s just way too bulky for me as a daily laptop.

The thing with the 110s is that it’s extremely underpowered. I still like the form factor a lot, and it has survived a few years without big issues. I upgraded the hard drive with an M2 SSD (no NVME support), but the RAM is soldered in place, and it’s just 2GB. Basically, if I want to open a few programs at the same time, it’s going to freeze or crash.

So, looking for options, and trying to keep it at 11/12 inches of screen, the options are not that many, especially for someone that looks for frugal options (no need for a heavy GPU on my tiny laptop). I found a few devices on Aliexpress, and a couple options in the education lines of some brands (mostly Chromebooks, a no-go for me).

Sooooooo, finally I decided to try my luck with a second hand ThinkPad. These devices are famous for being generally repairable, sturdy, and long lasting. And, although the older models where way too bulky for me, and the more modern ones too fragile and hard to upgrade, I found an option perfectly in the middle: meet the ThinkPad X270.

This beautiful beast is equiped, in the second hand configuration that I found online, with:

• Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-7200U CPU.
• 8GB DDR4 SODIMM upgradeable RAM.
• 256GB Samsung NVME SSD for storage, and the option to add a second disk on the WAN slot.
• Dual battery, with an internal 24Wh battery and an external 24Wh battery (currently missing, but a replacement is coming), with larger options for the external too.
• 2 USB3 type A connectors and a USB-C connector (that can charge the device!)
• Full size HDMI output and Ethernet ports, and an SD card reader.
• The eternal keyboard clit / nipple, the TrackPoint.

All in all, a huge upgrade from my previous machine. Not too expensive (130€ with shipping, but can be found cheaper), and my unit is basically in mint condition (minus the missing battery, but that’s just 30€ and a bit of shipping time to fix). The size is perfect for me, the power is more than enough for many years.

Aaaand I can mess with it. Expect soon a small tutorial on how I changed the flipping display. I’m still amazed by how easy that was.

Software

Software, in my case, is the key part. Yes, this laptop is perfectly capable of running whatever I want to throw at it. But if my previous trashmachine (with love) was still kicking, it’s because I love making things light and frugal.

And for this one, I’m repeating experience with my distro of choice: Endeavour OS. It’s basically a glorified Arch linux installer, but thanks to that the system is up and running fast with most commodities. Rigth now I’m simply don’t have the time / energy to mess up with an Arch installation from scratch, and on laptops specially there are too many goodies that I would miss that way. With either budgie or XFCE on Endeavour, I get all of the arch software and sane setup, without having to decide all the details. Simply super!

Obviously, this gets paired with a bit of software to make my life easier:

• As a browser, you can’t go wrong with Firefox. I’ve setup my policies to disable the private/incognito browsing, which is the kind of stuff that helps me be productive and mindful.
• For email, I use Posteo, and the web interface is a bit… archaic. So as an email client, I stick with Claws Mail (because thunderbird is way too bloated for my taste).
• For now, my news are served through RSS Guard, because RSS rulez.
• I don’t use an IDE for programming, rather, I tend to use two fantastic editors:
  • On the terminal, I use micro, because even after years of Vim, the sane defaults of micro make my life so much easier for quick edits.
  • But in general, I use Pragtical, a superb fork of Lite XL. This is a great and simple editor, with the right amount of functionality to code on a larger codebase without needing to set up weird extensions or anything. I only do light coding, so between this and JupyterLab I’m golden.
• Note taking and everything organization is also done in Pragtical, instead of Notion or Obsidian. I prefer to stick to normal markdown or typst text files, and I simply organize them by folders. The structure changes from time to time, but I’ll soon post about the current iteration.
• And all my files are synced between devices with Syncthing, because I don’t trust any cloud provider. Although the day that a vulnerability on this software appears, I’m going to be royally fckd.

Why I wrote all of this

Honestly, it’s half a self note to my future, and half an statement. I’m proud of tinkering with my stuff, of knowing my tools, of making my choices. And I may have spent a slightly excessive amount of time doing that… But I enjoy every second on this computer, and I think that’s simply nice.