Goodbye, ThinkPad

My ThinkPad X250 is a nice, small laptop that’s neat for light tasks, however as of recent, that may not be the case.

Issues

The laptop is sure portable, but that comes at the cost of many things:

  • Performance (the i5-5300U and HD 5500 Graphics are quite old now!)
  • Temperatures (tiny heatsink)
  • Ports (partially solved by a docking station)
  • Upgradability (one RAM slot and no M.2)
  • Battery life (yes, theyre old, but it’s not the batterys faults here)

Issues in depth

The Intel Core i5-5300u is about 10 years old, 2 cores really holds it back with modern software that’s currently evolving.

The Intel HD 5500 Graphics is also really showing its age when it comes to media work, video editing is a struggle with Magix Vegas Pro and Minecraft: Java Edition puts the iGPU to its knees, even with optimization workarounds.

Thermals are quite horrible considering this laptop doesn’t even have a dGPU, it’ll reach 91 degrees celsius playing Minecraft: Java with a mediocre framerate. Issue - the heatsink design is only one heatpipe with a tiny fan.

Port selection is odd, 2 USB ports and VGA I don’t mind, but Mini DisplayPort? I don’t have a single spare cable in my house for that! The ThinkPad Ultra Dock does help… Until you forget to bring it with you, which happened in my internship - yikes.

Upgrading this laptop is too expensive nor worth it considering above complaints. 8GB RAM is managable for some people, but not me. My main tower has 24GB RAM and my laptop could do with 16GB minimum, however the issue lies with getting more RAM for this laptop - a single DDR3 16GB SODIMM costs more than the laptop itself! Besides RAM, storage and Wi-Fi card upgrades are easy and cheap.

The battery life situation is odd, the batteries are quite old, but issue seems to vary between the OS choice: Windows 8.1-10 has quite good battery life, 2-3 hours is managable. Linux? 30 minutes to an hour if you’re lucky. I used to daily drive Fedora on this laptop before I installed Windows 10 for work and DAMN! Now I can actually use my laptop without being tethered to the outlet!

One attribute won’t save this laptop anyway

Just because battery life is decent, the CPU and iGPU are still a HUGE limiting factor for its usability, however it may see a new life as a ChromeBook-like device or to experiment… Or I might sell it.

What laptop am I actually looking for now?

My new laptop needs to have a decent iGPU or GPU that can handle media work, can play some light’ish games and still be usable outside of work for general use, so far I’m still not so sure about my options, my budget is fluctuating often, but I am stoked for the Galaxy Book series:

  • Design
  • Hardware
  • 2-in-1 360 stuff
  • Type-C charging
  • Ecosystem integration

And many, many more things..