It's a Thinkpad thing

I've used a handful of Thinkpads in my time and have always found them to be great tools of the trade. They're dependable, easily serviceable, fairly sturdy and they just work.

It's no wonder that they are the darlings of the if you know you know crowd, those who troll the second hand market for exceptional deals on previous generation hardware that is being end of life'd for those in the corporate world.

My current older school-aged kids, two in high school and one in middle school, each have Lenovo T480's loaded up with some distribution of Linux and they work very well for what they are. They aren't gaming machines, but that's not what they're for - they are great tools to learn the basics of computing and perhaps some light programming and scripting. Plus, lots and lots of web browsing.

I've got a couple of workstation style versions, one a P1 Gen 2, and an X1 Carbon Gen 2 - both basically identical boxes. The former holds a Xeon and 64GB of memory, while the later is an i7 with 32 GB of memory. Sadly, I think something happened with the P1 - it no longer powers on or charges. I've tried about all the tricks that I know and have been able to find, yet nothing works on it. It's been that way since I made an attempt to add a second nvme drive to it….I can't help but think that maybe I did something to damage the board, but I don't really know. Makes me sad, because it's a great chassis - 4K touchscreen and all.

Maybe one of these days I'll see if it's not possible to put the X1 Carbon's mainboard into the P1's shell. But, for now, I'm happy with how things are.

One of these days I might write up a page on what all applications and hardware I use. We'll see. For now, I think I'm basically using this post as a way to ensure that my installation of everything works and I can publish to my site. So far, so good.