This Lenovo X230 from 2011 Is Amazing!

I recently started taking a graduate embedded systems class at my local university. (I get to take classes for free because I’m a university employee. It’s awesome. Consider working for a university.). Anyway, the IDE we use is not well supported on MacOS so the laptop I have for work was not cutting it. I needed a laptop that could run Linux or Windows but Windows costs money.

I dug around in the back of my closet and pulled out my Lenovo X230 laptop that I bought circa 2011 and used for most of undergrad and all of grad school. It served me well but once I started working, I got super nice laptops from work and this little guy started languishing in the back of my closet. Also, the keyboard was missing several keys, the battery was dead (like not charging dead), and the little rubber feet on the bottom had mostly come off, causing it to wiggle like wobbly cafe table and scratch whatever surface it sat on.

So I started searching around to see if this old guy was repairable. Long story short, I procured a replacement keyboard for $40, a replacement 9-cell battery for $35 and discovered that this laptop is the most repairable piece of tech I have ever owned! It literally took five minutes of watching an (official Lenovo repair video)[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9r7A5OpUAlk] to replace the keyboard flawlessly. I even got a chance to dust out the fans while I was in there!

The laptop isn’t quite like new but it’s really damn close. There are minor cracks in portions of the outer protective casing and there’s a tiny smudge on the screen from some unidentified past trauma. But it’s got an i7 (first gen I think), 16G RAM, and a SSD storage drive. Ubuntu 22.04 runs like a dream, as does my MCUXpresso IDE. Best of all, with the 9-cell battery, this laptop now has about a 10hr battery life under normal daily use. I’m intentionally cycling the battery per the manufacturer’s instructions and I haven’t charged it since I replaced the battery three days ago!