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Treating a ThinkPad like a Project Car (and why you should too)

15 | 21st Jul 2025

Good day, gang. It's been a while since I've made a post once again. Here's a short summary of updates:

• The mp3 player in post 13 has failed on me and no longer charges... I'll look into this further soon
• Microblog is live! Check it out here. Expect short updates of varying topics, and all the stuff too short for its own blog post.
• (Hesitantly) started a blog post rating all of Taylor Swift's songs. It's taking a while since she's a polar opposite of what I usually listen to... so if you'd like to see progress so far check out a WIP here.
• Secured a #1. We'll call her Freezer!

All good stuff (minus the mp3 player thing). I love wasting money.



Hey look! I can embed microblog posts throughout the website! Nice. Alright.. let's get on topic, shall we?

Treating a ThinkPad like a Project Car (and why you should too)

15 | 21st Jul 2025
For real this time

For a long time, I've wanted a low-power, kinda shit laptop to mess around on and customise to my heart's extent. But after suggesting this to my friends, they thought it'd be pointless or a waste of money so I've been demotivated to go through with it.

And then came Freezer. The bane of my existence. My knight in shining denim. Freezer, conveniently enough, used to have a ThinkPad L470 for doing school work on during the whole COVID thing, and out of the infinite kindness of their heart, has given it to me to tinker with!

Issues

Out of the box (or I guess, in this context, a storage cupboard or something), there are a few issues with this laptop:

1. It's unbearably slow. This is probably due to the storage device being a 2.5" Hard Drive, so we'll need to order an SSD. Shouldn't be too expensive, we don't need much space.
2. Some letters on the keyboard don't work. ThinkPads usually have spare parts easily available online, so getting one for cheap can't be hard.

These issues are nothing we can't fix, so let's go online and buy things!!

Buying parts

New keyboard + new storage drive

For the SSD, I've went with a SATA Kingston 240GB from Overclockers UK. These were one of the cheapest parts I could find on PCPartPicker, and apparently these laptops take SATA out the box so we should be fine.

As for the keyboard, I found a cheap backlit keyboard on ajparts.co.uk. It might not be genuine, but seeing how expensive genuine keyboards are, a non-genuine one can't hurt much. Not like this laptop has genuine checks or anything.

The SSD and keyboard altogether cost around £60 including shipping. Really not too bad! I'm considering this purchase the cost of the entire laptop so I can convince myself I'm making a smart financial choice.

The SSD's arrival

And installing an Operating System on it

The SSD came on the following Sunday, and right away I decided to install it. Opening up the laptop for the first time, I was absolutely astonished by how modular this laptop was. All of the parts can just be screwed out, and I'm pretty sure it was using a CPU socket (which means I can replace it if I wanted to!)


As you can see, the HDD is currently sat in a little 2.5" bay, and it's secured by nothing but a bit of padding attached to the back part. Taking it out was super easy, and replacing it was even easier. The SSD fit very snug in place.


Alright, now that the SSD is in place, we can install an OS!

...right?

Well, as it turns out, the BIOS for this thing is locked down with an unknown password, which means I can't tell the computer to boot from a USB and install an OS from one. There are a few workarounds to this, but I've come up with the safest option: attaching the SSD to my PC and installing it on that.

So, one Arch Linux installation (and SSD reinstallation) later, and here we are! Success! Hooray!

Don't mind the mess consisting of the old keyboard, a USB keyboard, and my PC panels.

As you can see from the picture above, I've installed i3 and applied the theming that I talked about in blog post #08. I'm in love! All I need now is for the keyboard to arrive...

Hey look! The keyboard arrived!

Let's hope installing it is as easy as installing the SSD...

That subtitle is foreshadowing by the way. Plugging in the cables was an easy job, but slotting the keyboard in was a pain in the ass that took a lot longer than it should have.

After 30+ minutes of painfully screwing things in and fucking around with tabs, I've finally managed to secure the keyboard in place... kind of. It still enjoys falling out upon hard impacts, but it's as secure as can be. The price I pay for going cheap!

All the keys at least work properly now! Though an area of complaint I have is with the Z key. Its key cap is a bit loose, and sometimes falls out, but it shouldn't be too much of an inconvenience. The keyboard itself feels genuine other than these things, I really enjoy typing with it.

Doing some stuff on the laptop (with the keyboard!)

Overall

Was this project worth it?

Considering I haven't touched my £1200 Asus laptop since I got this one, I'd say definitely. It's powerful enough to do light tasks, and the SSD upgrade has sped it up significantly. The feel of the keyboard is great, it has a nice weight (but not too heavy) and the trackpad is awesome, especially the top buttons. Love the feel of using this thing, and it feels very rewarding to use.

I compared it to a car project previously because of how modular everything is, and how easy it seems to be to replace everything. Every part of this computer can be bought online, and I'd love to see someone build this thing from the ground up using only online parts. I think I know what my next YouTube watch is.

The praise for ThinkPads certainly seems worth it. This project was super fun, and I look forward to working on it more in the future.



If you've made it this far... thanks for reading! It really does mean a lot knowing that people are reading my stuff. If you're interested in my music, I'm currently working on a new small EP that includes an extended version of "how do we connect", a re-EQ'd version of Andiamo and 3 completely new tracks! Stay tuned, and if you have any kind words, send me an email! :)