Got me a little upgrade
A T495s to replace my aging T430. The T430 is still quite usable, but the original battery with 34% health isn't great, though it gets through a 2 hour lecture no problem.
I do miss the trackpoint buttons and smaller trackpad, I tend to move the mouse with my palm while using the trackpoint, but otherwise the new one is better in every way.
Is the T430 still socketed?
I got a battery for a T410 relatively easily.
Yeah I could get a new battery for it, but getting a new battery, a better screen, more RAM and a better CPU would be more expensive than the 150€ total I paid for the T495s and would still leave me with a 14 year old laptop.
T430 is socketed* and the 35-watt quad cores (3632qm, 3612qm) are nice upgrades that won't put extra strain on the fan or battery. Bonus of being compatible with the T410 battery if you patch the EC.
*the T430S variant is not socketed
How is the new one working for you? I tried to use an X13 with a similar chip set for work and I kept running into issues with little things, Bluetooth was weird and sleep was a gamble. Thankfully work bought be the X1 dev edition for my Linux machine but I'm always wondering if I had stuck with it for a little longer if it would have ironed out. The performance and battery life on that X13 really impressed me though, and I prefer AMD to Intel.
I've only had it for a day, but so far seems to work very well. Will see next week when I need to do some actual work with it, so far I've been just playing around. No problems with sleep so far, though it take quite a bit longer to wake up that the T430, though that might have to do with libreboot also, not available for the new one unfortunately. I rarely use bluetooth, but I just tried pairing up a mouse and it went smoothly.
Haven't needed to do any tinkering, everything including the fingerprint reader works out of the box.
I have had pretty good luck with fingerprint scanners, most just seem to work. If you have some Bluetooth headphones I would be interested to hear how those do, that's mostly what I had issues with. Good to hear about sleep though, it's kinda rough to have a laptop without working sleep mode.
Paired my Galaxy Buds Pro to the laptop, took a while for them to appear on the list but they do work fine.
Sick!