I've been talking semi-seriously for quite a while about how my
upgrade plan from my T480 is to go to a T420. This week I realized
that's a horrible idea if I go for it and the T420 isn't sufficient
for my needs.

So I just went ahead and ordered the T420 now. It was pretty much
what I wanted when it got here: good keyboard, loads of ports,
expandable enough that it came with *16 GIGS* of ram in a 12 year
old laptop. SATA hard drive too, which means easy access to SSDs. Of
course the day it arrived one of the keycaps popped off. That's
pretty much par for the course for all thinkpads, in fact I had a
keycap pop off of my T480 the day before it arrived. Thankfully new
keyboards are cheap and plentiful for pretty much every model  so I
ordered a new one on the day. Software turned out to be a bit more
of an issue than I'd expected. My Linux of choice is Slackware of
course, but the 15.0 installer freezes in GRUB. I had to install
14.2 and then upgrade to 15.0, but it worked well from that point
on. I have TDE set up, am moving a subset of my files over, since the
ssd in here is only 500 gigs, about 300 of which I gave to Slackware.

I've got to say so far it's working perfectly. It handles browsers,
which is of course the biggest worry these days.  I can definitely
tell that the io isn't as fast as the T480, but not annoyingly
so. It runs all my chat programs, multitasks fine. I've used the
thinklight multiple times, even.

Whose idea was it to keep making laptops after 2012? Even talking
with my roommate he thinks they peaked in 2012 with the unibody
macbooks.

After a few days I do have one 'pain point' I suppose.  The screen
kinda sucks. It has a very narrow viewing angle. Luckily there
are upgrade kits available to go to a 1080p ip screen, so I'll be
looking into that at some point. Shouldn't be too bad of a hack.

Another update: I've ordered a new battery for the thinkpad as well.
This one's okay, but I'm hoping that I can get more than 2-3 hours
out of it with a new battery, especially since I'm not stocked up
on chargers for this like I am USB-C.

.