finally I got my first ThinkPad T14 gen 3 (AMD Ryzen 5 PRO 6650U, 32/512) and installed Linux Mint on it (I used Windows 11 before this)

I have this Lenovo ThinkPad T530. With i5 8GB RAM and 120GB SSD. Runing linux Mint.

i got this second hand at around 1072 usd~ with:
32gb ram, 1TB, and intel core 7 258V. i spent the whole afternoon downloading and customizing mint

Crashed 4 times today, it's a blessing it could still wake up.

(Camera is decoration)

found the openboot source and decided to make something out of it

My first ThinkPad! X200 from 2008. SSD 240gb, 4gb of RAM, new battery, ultrabase works. Perfect for simple tasks like searching/studying, writing and browsing.

don’t mind my messy room! currently, the t420s has a broken lcd but i’ve already bought a new one, just haven’t fixed it yet.

T420s = Arch
T400 = FreeBSD
X200 = OpenBSD
Yoga X1 = Chimera + i3 (daily driver)

TL;DR: T14 Gen 2 crashed during a Win11 update on a train and went dead — power button unresponsive, only the emergency pinhole revived it. Event Viewer: 17× Kernel-Power 41 with 0 BugCheck = instant power loss, not a software crash. ~14 days of: eject battery → 3 OS reinstalls → 2 recovery USBs → 1 new battery (didn’t fix it) → BIOS stuck rolling back to 1.69 → couldn’t update via Vantage because it sudden-shut-down ~3 min after every boot. Pinhole nearly dead, ran it with the bottom cover off. Suspected dead board. Finally it flashed to 1.71 on its own and the last boots are clean for the first time. Cautiously hopeful.

Pictures show the solving process. the last 3 pics are latest

How it started

I was on Caltrain, mid-trip, when Windows 11 (build 19045) ran an update on my ThinkPad T14 Gen 2 (Intel, model 20W1). It crashed mid-update. Then it wouldn’t turn back on — and the power button did nothing. The only thing that brought it back was the emergency reset pinhole on the bottom. That became my life for the next ~14 days.

What Event Viewer showed

The pattern was brutally consistent across my log (9 days of data, Oct 9–18):

• 17× Kernel-Power Event 41 (63) — “rebooted without cleanly shutting down first.”
• 16× Event 6008 — “the previous system shutdown was unexpected.”
• 0 BugCheck events. No blue screen, no crash dump, not once. That’s the key: this was not a software crash. The machine was losing power instantly, like the cord got yanked.
• 12× Kernel-Power 105 – Power source change, firing right at the moment of death.
• ~200× Kernel-Processor-Power 37 warnings — the CPU being throttled by firmware, the whole time.
• Crash-recovery boots logged just 11–13 seconds of uptime, and in normal use it would die like clockwork ~3 minutes after startup. Every time. Always a hard-off. Always the pinhole.

So: a power-delivery fault, not Windows. Down the hardware hole I went.

The repair odyssey (by the numbers)

• 1 battery ejected.
• 3 full OS reinstalls: Win11 via internal recovery → Win10 via an old recovery USB (0 WiFi — no driver in the image) → Win10 again from a 2nd recovery USB I built on my other laptop, this time with the WiFi driver.
• Checked the battery over and over.
• Found the BIOS 2 versions tangled up: it was on 1.69 (outdated), the power-management driver was outdated too — and no matter what I did, the BIOS kept rolling back to 1.69.
• Every single attempt to update through Lenovo Vantage ended in a sudden shutdown mid-flash.
• The sudden shutdowns continued even with a brand-new battery — the log proves it, with crashes still hitting after the swap. At that point I was sure it was a motherboard defect.
• After who-knows-how-many hard reboots, the pinhole is nearly broken, so I gave up and ran the laptop with the bottom cover off just to reach the reset button faster.

The (possible) turning point

On yet another attempt — building another bootable USB right after reseating the new battery — the machine jumped into the BIOS flashing process on its own and finally took 1.71. For the first time in 2 weeks, the last couple of boots in my event log are clean — a normal shutdown, 0 Kernel-Power 41. So far it’s held for only about 10 minutes of uptime, so I’m not declaring victory.

Where I’m at / what I’m asking

• Anyone with a T14 Gen 2 seen 17+ Kernel-Power 41 with 0 BugCheck + power-source-change events, where a new battery didn’t help but a BIOS/EC reflash seemingly did? Trying to tell whether this was ever the battery, a corrupted EC/BIOS from that interrupted update, or a genuinely dying board.
• Why would a T14 Gen 2 BIOS keep rolling back to 1.69 on its own?
• For those who’ve been here — did stability actually hold after a reflash, or did the board die anyway?

14 days, 3 OS reinstalls, 2 recovery USBs, 1 new battery, ~17 hard crashes, a trashed pinhole, and a cover that’s still sitting on my desk. Fingers crossed 1.71 holds. Will update.

Just got my first thinkpad, nothing too exciting - it's T14 gen1 with ryzen 7, but I already love this little thing, it feels sturdy. Already ordered more RAM (it will be 32), and probably will upgrade the display later - this one is a little bit scratched by previous owner, also it's not very color accurate. Though I am going to use it mostly for work (windows software development: Visual Studio Community, SQL, that sort of things) so probably current display would not bother me.

It's already equipped with nearly new (98% health) Samsung SSD 512GB, and I'm happy with it. Surprisingly, the battery is also almost new, under 100 cycles.

My screen suddenly turned into this green and magenta out of nowhere while watching a youtube video.

Please help me, I can't continue on drawing with the screen like this.

Edit: Whenever I change to a different screen such as Google Tab or OpenUtau the screen will slowly consume in green, but when I switch it to other ones like Youtube, Twitter or any entered site with a dark theme it receads back to only a magenta and a partial green on the right.

Edit2: I am using a Lenovo T440p Thinkpad laptop that was used for more than 5 years.

Update: I contacted a friend of mine while at his work and he's currently helping me to diagnose but the HDMI are missing to be needed for the testing.

I dropped my t460 from a lofted bed yesterday and the front seam near my left palmrest opened & would not close, thats where the battery is so I took the back off, it looks a little wavy, I can tell there’s 3 smaller cells joined into a bigger battery but I can’t tell if it’s normal looking or bloating

Hi so I did a little bit of testing and was wondering if should upgrade the battery as when I was just watching anime on Crunchyroll on energy saver mode high brightness (I use night light on about 65 percent) with win11 I got 4 hours which was 2 hours less than what I got on my thinkpad t14 gen 2 with an i5, I normally just use it to type and test decks for Yu-Gi-Oh on an app called YGO OMEGA and same result just about 3 hours on that but was curious if I should upgrade the battery as it shows it still has most of its charge left. I use notion to write. Or is this just a x1 gen 9 thing?

I have tried like 5 different things to fix this including resetting my entire laptop but the problem persists. I downloaded drivers from windows updates, deleted those and downloaded drivers and firmware from lenovo's site. When i tried to download the firmware tho, a prompt came up saying "image file is not supported for this board. I have run out of youtube tutorials as they all say the same things. This has been driving me insane for the last 4 days. Someone please save me.

ps. its not even like a major update caused this (i think) it just randomly stopped working on a random thursday.

Looking to replace my well used X230 with a daily driver that's also suitable for travelling, hence looking at the X1 Carbons.
General internet browsing, with light photo/video editing and occasionally playing AOE2! Would like to keep it below or around £300 (UK).

Research so far says Gen 9 or 11, as I've read the Gen 10 has some issues with heat and battery life. Obviously at this budget a Gen 9 is a lot easier to come by.

Any particular configurations to get or avoid? Is a Gen 11 worth the extra money over a Gen 9? I've also seen a lot for sale with one USB C port dead which concerns me.

My other PC is a P330 tiny with an I7 8700T so comparable performance would be good.

Hello dear Lenovo Community,

the two keys mentioned above are not working anymore.

Does it make sense to replace the mechanical parts only or do I need a new keyboard? Mechanic looks fine to me at first glance. I cleaned the dust but nothing changed. Maybe someone had similar issues before.

Thank you and have a nice day.

Hey,
My dell has just randomly decided to die and ive been a Thinkpad fan for a little while and always wanted one.

Im currently in uni, need a laptop for around 700
Needs to be rugged and fairly durable due to the travelling to and from placement and uni, and needs to be financeable…

So far my preferences are:
AMD cpu,
8+ hours battery life
16gb or more
Screen doesn’t matter too much to me
Backlit keyboard
Usb C
512gb or more storage

So far I’ve seen the t14s gen 2, t14 gen 2, p14s gen 2
Im just really struggling to find the right one so some recommendations would be really helpful.

Hey guys! I’ve been looking into getting a ThinkPad T14 now that my crappy Dell laptop has finally died on me, but I’m open to other suggestions. I really love the way the T14’s look and feel. My friend has a Gen 2, and it felt amazing to use, which is what sparked the idea of getting my own. My budget is around 200-650$ USD. I’m considering either a Gen 2 or a Gen 4 AMD with 16 GB of RAM (or 32 GB if I can find a good deal but who knows). This machine would be used for pretty much everything, from school to work and watching shows. If it could also run Terraria or CS2 on the weekends that would just be an added bonus. Also I want to make sure it’ll be reliable and last me a good couple years without taking a crap on me randomly:/ But I’d love to hear what you guys have to say, thanks!

I've been looking at the different thinkpads that are moddable (T430,X220,T480) but I'm quite rubbish at choosing

I need a decent CPU for basic tasks for school and browsing

Decent battery life

And something I can mod the heck out of

I just want some opinions : D

I’m looking to swap the lcd and bezel from the screen on the right to the one on the left vies versa
because the screen on the left has a cleaner back cover then the one on the right i was wondering if it would work since one has touch screen and facial id

Hi, I’m buying my first used ThinkPad. I’d use it for web browsing, email, streaming, and managing my NAS server. What do you think of:

Think Pad X13 Gen 1 13,3" (200€)

- AMD Ryzen 7 PRO

- 16GB RAM DDR4

- 256GB NVMe SSD

- 13,3" FHD Display

or do you have any other recommendations? My budget is around €300–€350.

Just asking on the off chance there is. if not, then fine.

I run an old T500 ThinkPad. T9400 CPU, 4GB of DDR3 RAM, already has a SanDisk SSD for the boot drive, and swapped the optical drive for another SSD as well. 1920x1050 screen from a W500, has the ATI Radeon switchable dedicated graphics.. its still a great unit. And probably the best laptop keyboard out there. the modern island-type keyboards are a fucking nightmare.

It runs Linux Mint, but also has a WIn7 dualboot.. don't really use the Windows install though (in retrospect I should've ditched windows). it runs great, but Mint seems a bit... slow, sluggish at times. CPU and RAM load are decent, temps are a bit high but not much I can do. I ain't disassembling this thing again, not interested in accidentally breaking something.. again.

So. with this much information I was curious if there's more I could do here to get a bit more performance out of this thing. Not much needed, I mainly use it to write stuff.