Thinkpad X230 tablet

Discussion of hardware related issues
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wove
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Joined: Mon May 04, 2020 4:47 pm

Thinkpad X230 tablet

Post by wove »

It must be the time of the year to dig to the bottom of if IT locker and get rid of all the unused cruft. I picked up an X230 Tablet, that was very clean except for being covered with asset tags. It must have used some of the IT tools Lenovo provides to keep people from messing with the machines. The BIOS was missing some important configuration options and it took a while to sort that out, get it to boot from USB and turn on camera and fingerprint reader. It was sold saying it did not have a camera or fingerprint reader or hard drive. It did include the hard drive carrier and cove though. The end result is a nice clean well working machine.

i have no need of this. I was just curious because the X230 is the last of the X series to come in tablet form. Overall it is an X220 with a slight bump in specs and a chicklet keyboard. I like the X220 keyboard better, but this is an OK keyboard. The stylus that came with it looks unused and works well. It would be nice to find a Linux distro that supports the touch/tablet/stylus features of the hardware as well as Windows does.
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tlmiller
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Re: Thinkpad X230 tablet

Post by tlmiller »

You can put an X220 keyboard in a X230, it's a very common mod for X230 users.
wove
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Re: Thinkpad X230 tablet

Post by wove »

The stock X230 keyboard is a ok keyboard. There way a lot of teeth gnashing over the change, but I see the whole hullabaloo as a tempest in teapot. Having both the X220 and X230 and comparing them side by side, the differences are very marginal. For me anyway day to day usage feels essentially the same.

From a software and OS stand point I am not sure there is any real difference. Both machines run Windows, Linux, Haiku, BSD and even MacOS, which even though rather dated, makes them very versatile machines.
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crosscourt
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Re: Thinkpad X230 tablet

Post by crosscourt »

Im the same as Im not that picky about keyboards and the chicklet style in many cases is a lot better at preventing water intrusion.
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wove
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Re: Thinkpad X230 tablet

Post by wove »

Overall there is very little change from the X220 to the X230. The i5 processor moves from Gen2 to Gen3. I think the processors run at the same clock speed. The biggest noticeable change is all the USB ports move to USB 3 and that makes a big difference in transferring data.

Like the X220, the X230 seems to support anything you toss at it. I have had it running FreeBSD, Deepin, Endless and Endeavour without a hitch. (Oh, it also does Windows 10 as well, and I saw one for sale on eBay that claimed it was running Windows 11 just fine as well. At this moment I am playing with PopOS which has a great many keyboard shortcuts making it very usable on the X230. NextCloud stores a great deal of my daily content which makes it fairly quick to setup and have a different OS quickly. The downside of that being it makes OS hopping a bit too easy.

I ordered a 3rd party battery for the X220, which was (is) total garbage. When I complained to the seller, they said "sorry" and sent me another battery. The replacement appears to be a good battery. I am getting around 5-6 hours on a full charge. X230 and X220 batteries are the same, so one battery is good in both and the other battery serves to fill the big hole in the back of the laptop. Both the x220 and x230 use the same docking station, which could be handy for I have a docking station with a DVD burner in it.
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