Thinkpad W520

J

jbtotheh

I've been looking at FreeBSD on this machine on and off for a bit now, fortunately someone shared some good help in the freebsd-desktop mailing list a while ago. Seems like there's more activity here though.

As of right now, this is about as good a daily driver as this machine has been! I have a few SSDs I swap in and out of it. I bought it to run FreeBSD on it long ago, but wifi was a big sticking point. Now it's not, and today I got suspend to S3, Wireguard, changing wifi networks and I think something else working. It's nice it can run Linux binaries. I've been liking Sublime Text as my editor lately.

One of my previous adventures with it took advantage of boot environments bigly. ZFS for the win!

Just want to express my gratitude for the FreeBSD community keeping the lights on. I had dropped away over frustration with the wifi thing, but it's fine now. Thanks! 🙏
 
I'm running 15.1 on my W520 and am very pleased with it although have just attached my fourth PSU, so I don't know if they are known to be flakey.

If has been my daily driver for over a year. It's nice having a big screen.

The sound is a bit crappy. My phone has better audio and is probably ten times louder.
 
balanga said:
I'm running 15.1 on my W520 and am very pleased with it although have just attached my fourth PSU, so I don't know if they are known to be flakey.

If has been my daily driver for over a year. It's nice having a big screen.

The sound is a bit crappy. My phone has better audio and is probably ten times louder.
Click to expand...
Getting through 4 power supplies doesn't sound right, I never heard of that even with these large machines.
 
balanga said:
I'm running 15.1 on my W520 and am very pleased with it although have just attached my fourth PSU, so I don't know if they are known to be flakey.

If has been my daily driver for over a year. It's nice having a big screen.

The sound is a bit crappy. My phone has better audio and is probably ten times louder.
Click to expand...

I never liked these huge 170W PSU bricks ... so I moved 'back' to use the 135W PSU from ThinkPad W510 ... they still work like a charm.

To be honest ... I never needed that NopeVidia bullshit they put into these W520 - I just wanted CPU cores and RAM and FHD screen and keyboard layout.

After some time I got the T520 with Quad Core CPU put in (from W520) ... but that was after I switched to F25 (the FrankenPad T25 laptop based on T480).

I still have them all, two W520, two T520 (both with Quad Core CPU), three or more X220 (not modded) and at least one T420s ... what can I say ... I like redundancy.

Each and one of them will still work great under FreeBSD ... and I plan to use some of them in the future ... and I need to fix one of the W520 because the fan died ... the parts are here ... the time is not.

jbtotheh

W520 is a great laptop - I have spend over a decade on it and FreeBSD works really well on it - You will be very happy about it.

Feel free to ask if needed.

Regards,
vermaden
 
I actually had a W520 for a while at work, back when they were the latest thing. The theory was that the company could replace a real desktop PC and a separate laptop with a single big laptop. It didn't really work out because the W520 was a bit too large to carry around, and pretty soon people were being given X-series laptops to carry around while the W520's stayed on the desks. 😂 . It made a nice desktop though, built like a tank, and of course it had the excellent classic thinkpad keyboard, and 32GB RAM was really good back then. Yes I remember the huge power adapter, that was another thing you didn't want to lug around with you. The classic thinkpads were so good for ports and expansion too, it really was a full PC, not a stripped-down ultrabook with only one or two tiny fragile connector sockets like you get today. In recent years I've standardised on X-series boxes, I have a pile of X201's and X220's that I'm keepng in reserve, I made a point of stocking up a few years ago when they were being sold off cheap on ebay. I really like the 220 because I can put 16GB ram and an extra msata drive inside in addition to the normal sata drive, and all works great with freebsd.

I guess it's getting a bit hard to find that genuine large power brick for the W520 nowadays. Probably the clones aren't built to the same standard as the genuine lenovo version. It seems pretty unlucky to have had four of them fail though!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top