Martin's NEW ThinkPad T430

Those of you who watch the channel will be familiar with My Lenovo ThinkPad T420 that I've been using for the last 6 months.

It got a new SSD from SK Hynix the SL300 120GB


The worn out trackpad surface was replaced


Then lastly the 1366x768 HD LED Screen was upgraded to a 1600x900 HD+ LED panel.


One of my buddies has been bringing his laptop to me for the past 8+ years for various repairs, a service and upgrades, it was an HP Pentium Dual core machine, one of their consumer based machines, cheap & nasty but served him well over the years. It was originally a Vista machine, I upgraded it to Windows 7 a few years ago and then it was back at me for the free Windows 10 upgrade when MS were giving it out. It ended up getting a more powerful CPU and the ram maxed out to 4GB a year ago to try and breath some more life into it for him. He's not a power user just moderate web browsing. The hard drive failed recently so it was back to me for a replacement and re setup, while I had it I loaned him the T420 for a few days to keep him going, got his machine running as best as it could for an older machine and got it back to him. A few days after returning it to him I got a phone call from him saying he misses the T420 and needs one in his life!

So onto eBay I go searching for a T420 for him, when I realise the T430 prices have come down a little recently. Finding a NICE T430 within his budget was looking unrealistic so that's where the plan suddenly changed, I would find a nice T430 for myself and sell him my T420.

I've always fancied a T430, especially since they were available with an LED backlit keyboard. I was finding it hard to find one with the backlit keyboard but a quick google search revealed they are plug and play and a UK Seller has a stack of them brand new, Genuine Lenovo - Winner! That solved that issue, my only next requirement was it MUST have an SSD, as I wanted to keep my nearly new SK Hynix 120GB so needed an SSD to fit to the T420.

I managed to find a fantastic condition one, none of the usual scratches, marks, asset tag residue etc. It came with the following Spec...

Intel i5 3320m - Ivy Bridge 2.6GHz (3.3GHz TURBO Boost)
4GB DDR3 (1x4GB)
120GB Crucial M4 SSD
1600x900 LED panel (that saves me another job!!)















Swapped the SSD's over and gave both a fresh install of Windows 7 PRO activated via the COE on each machine and then an upgrade to Windows 10 PRO.
got the T430 updated to the latest bios, latest firmware, updated the DVD-RW drives firmware, gave the SK Hynix an update to the latest firmware, oh and used the Lenovo battery firmware update tool to do the battery too! That's a lot of updating!!!


So, what's the plans?
Well, the Backlit keyboard is already ordered, expect a video soon of this swap
upgrade to 16GB (2x8GB) Crucial Ballistix SPORT performance RAM in dual channel (interesting to see what sort of performance increase this brings - again expect a video!)

Running some benchmarks tonight, lets see how I get on!
Cheers

I love the Thinkpad since day 1 when IBM started selling them, so this is just a lovely machine, too.

3D Mark Vantage on the T420




and now the T430

Nik wrote:

I love the Thinkpad since day 1 when IBM started selling them, so this is just a lovely machine, too.

Same! I bought a refurbished T21 as my first laptop back maybe 2003-2004 and ive never looked back! - Work gave me an HP elite business grade thing a few years back and it wasn't a patch on the thinkpad!

unfortunatly I never had one.
In 2002 I bought an old compaq laptop (forgot the model), but someone stole it (useless for the thief as I kept the drives and docking station at home )

shame about the thief, at least he got no proper use out of it, at least without having to spend money first!!

I identified the model !
Looking up the hdd-tray's part number revealed, it was a Compaq Armada 41xx series model !

Time to run Cinebench R15, not a bad score...

wow, nice score.

What do we have here?!?!



Oh yes, LED Backlit keyboard baby!!!

Let's rock it in there, I wanna see it glow.

YEAH!
That looks REALLY AMAZING!!!

Great job, Martin!

I really love it.

Thanks
Video coming tomorrow but the swap literally took 3 minutes!, 2 screws, one connector and a little wiggling!

easier than stealing candy from a baby...