Antiquities: ThinkPad X200 and closed source

Exactly a year ago, I purchased a ThinkPad X301 laptop , and I thought that the topic of the “new retro” in laptop computers was closed, and the collection of two dozen laptops covers almost all eras, from DOS to Windows 7. But it seemed to me then, and in January 2020 I buy a new-old ThinkPad X200. Lenovo announced this model in September 2008, almost 12 years ago. The ThinkPad X series of ultraportable computers still exists today, but the X200 represents the “old school spirit” - it’s closer to IBM’s laptops from the beginning of the zero than to the ThinkPad X390 or X1.

Modern laptops have become thinner, larger screens fit the same dimensions, and productivity has grown significantly. But it became more difficult with maintainability and generally modular design: the memory is often soldered, and sometimes you can not even change the SSD. The battery is also built-in, instead of the classic docking station, there is an external box with a USB and Thunderbolt interface. I do not think that modern laptops are “spoiled”, but often there are not enough pleasant things from the past. To make the case strong and thick, so that there is a lock to fix the laptop in the closed position. Solved, take it!

In fact, the reason for buying this particular model was not only nostalgia. ThinkPad X200 is the latest generation of laptops for which there is an alternative BIOS version with fully open source, developed as part of the Libreboot project . This hitherto unknown direction for retrohobby, but there will be a separate article about it. The X200 is good on its own, so today I’ll talk about how it works in the more familiar to me ecosystem of closed source software. For such a not quite old model, you can still find spare parts, so I decided to bring it to the ideal: so that there was an uncompromising topic in excellent condition. And that’s what happened.

I keep a diary of a collector of old pieces of iron in a Telegram .

Laptops with already “stitched” Libreboot are sold for $ 300-400, and considering that the firmware itself is not a trivial procedure, and besides this, the laptop is also being restored, this is quite an adequate price. But I wanted, firstly, to find a cheaper device, and secondly - to go all the way of restoration and "opening source" myself. Unlike the more modern X201 or X220, this model is not so easy to find, but nothing is impossible. For 8,000 rubles, I bought a laptop, advertised as “budget for schoolchildren and students”, from the UK, with a British keyboard layout (big Enter, “backslash” to the right of the left Shift key, and here it clearly gets in the way). The characteristics of the laptop when buying were as follows:

Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo P8600 2.4 GHz
RAM: 2 GB, two DDR3 modules, maximum 8 GB
Hard disk: 200 GB 7200RPM, SATA2 interface
Wireless modules: Wi-Fi 802.11n, 2.4 and 5 GHz, Bluetooth 2.1, 3G modem
Connectors on the case: 3xUSB 2.0, modem port RJ11, VGA, Ethernet, ExpressCard 54mm, SD card slot
Screen: 12 inches 16:10, resolution 1280x800, TN, brightness 250 nits, contrast 250: 1
Extras: fingerprint sensor, 1.3MP webcam
Dimensions: 295x234x21-35mm
Weight: 1.35kg or 1.64kg with the most capacious 9-cell battery
Battery life: up to 9.8 hours with a 9-cell battery

In addition to the original X200, X200s were also available in the same series (a thinner display cover, a bit lighter, was available with a 1440x900 screen resolution, but was equipped with less powerful processors), and the X200 Tablet is a prototype of modern tablets with a touchscreen controlled by fingers or a pen. Already in 2008, this model among the competitors seemed like a dinosaur - there is no touchpad, and in the previous version a display with an aspect ratio of 4: 3 was still used. Although Lenovo tried to promote the ultraportable to the masses, releasing super-cheap (20 thousand rubles) versions with a Celeron processor that competed with netbooks, the X200 remained a device for connoisseurs.

The current ThinkPad X390 model is thinner (17 mm), with a width of just a centimeter, it accommodates a 13.3-inch matrix, which has much better brightness (400 nits) and contrast (1000: 1). The processor has become 4-core, the maximum amount of memory has grown to 32 gigabytes, but its size must be chosen when buying: everything is soldered to the motherboard. There are only two full-sized USB ports, there is no VGA port and naturally modem connector. The weight dropped from 1.6 to 1.2 kilograms, and this is actually a big difference - where the modern laptop is not felt in the bag, the old X200 is quite felt. But unlike my older laptops, there is no “heaven and earth” feeling. It just got more comfortable, many things got better, and some could be worse. Let's see which ones.

I like the old Thinkpad laptop keyboard, but I like the modern, chiclet keyboard too. Here is an authentic old school, though slightly spoiled by stickers. They are not for a different layout, so the seller "updated" worn and shiny keys.

Left view. Power connector, two USB, VGA, very convenient hardware switch for wireless modules, Ethernet. The ExpressCard slot has an accessory useful for such laptops - an adapter for three USB 3.0 ports. This thing works, but alas, it gets really hot. If you know the normal ExpressCard-USB3 adapters, let me know.

Right view. Another USB port, headphone and microphone jacks, are still separate. By today's standards, an ancient artifact is a telephone jack for the built-in V.92 modem. It may be useful to me.

View from below. Dock connector, separate cover for access to memory modules. The production date is visible: June 2009. Windows 7 will be released only in October 2009, so this device came with Windows Vista. But for some reason, the seller of the laptop decided to pick up the sticker with the serial for Vista and stuck the key for Windows 7. With the exception of this creative and the inevitable scuffs on the lid, the condition of the laptop is very good. The characteristics of the laptop make you want to use it not as a retro camera, but as a modern, albeit slightly slow, personal computer. But this requires an upgrade. Before the start of hostilities, I wanted to fix the performance of the initial configuration, preferably with some limited number of benchmarks. I chose the comprehensive PCMark 7 test: it matches the hardware,runs on modern hardware, availablecompletely free . I will test the processor performance with the Geekbench4 benchmark , and I use CrystalDiskMark 7 for the hard drive . Here are the results:

The first thing to do in such a laptop is to increase the amount of memory. I get two DDR3 modules of 4 gigabytes, a total of eight. This is the maximum amount - 16 gigabytes in this model will not work.

In benchmarks, an increase in memory by four times brings nothing, which is expected. The ancient PCMark 7 is not memory dependent; for Geekbench, volume is not as important as bandwidth. But due to the habit of modern browsers to eat incredible amounts of memory when displaying modern web pages, such an upgrade is simply necessary. The most noticeable brakes on the Windows interface and programs are removed by upgrading the hard drive to SSD. Unlike the ThinkPad X301, the X200 allows you to install a standard 2.5-inch data storage device. I am buying a 1 terabyte Samsung 860EVO SSD (walk like walk). I get the following:

Sequential read speed is limited by the SATA2 interface, here the results are two times worse than it could be. Compared with the HDD, there is an increase in read speed by almost four times. The write speed of small data blocks of 4 kilobytes has grown by more than 70 times! What will PCMark show?

The result in the comprehensive test grew by 76%. When this laptop was about five years old, replacing the hard drive with an SSD could well give it a second life. I want a more powerful processor, but it is soldered to the motherboard, and in any case, the most productive processor in the series differs in frequency by only 266 megahertz. But I have an uncompromising upgrade! .. On Aliexpress a motherboard for the X200 with an Intel Core 2 Duo P8800 processor was found .

Buying a finished laptop in this configuration will be extremely difficult. If I bought this model in 2008, I would not have taken the “most powerful” version either - the performance difference is small, but the cost is much higher.

Replacing the motherboard is a little more complicated than upgrading the memory, but in the X200 construct it is quite possible to do it yourself. The most difficult thing is to carefully lay the wires leading from the wireless modules to the display after installing the motherboard. At the same time, I removed the 3G module - I will not need it.

Everything worked on the second attempt. The first revealed that I forgot to apply thermal grease to the processor. To make sure that the laptop is fully operational, I launch a stress test in the AIDA64 Extreme program and leave the laptop under 100% load for a day.

To be honest, I was surprised by the results. The temperature under load was stable around 65 degrees, the fan did not accelerate above average revolutions. For its time, it was not only a powerful, but also quite quiet laptop. It turns out that with such a cooling system, the processor could be overclocked. But as far as I know, there are no ready-made solutions for this.

The final benchmark results are shown above. I did not expect much from changing the processor, but in an old laptop, even the extra 200 megahertz will allow you to better cope with modern software. The growth in Geekbench was slightly less than 9% in the multi-threaded test and 11 percent in single-threaded. PCMark has grown even less - by 2%. However, compared to the initial configuration, I increased performance by 80%, mainly due to the SSD. Now for the fun part: a comparison with a modern laptop.

Last year I purchased a ThinkPad T480 laptop. This is the 2018 model with a Core i7-8550u processor, 32 gigabytes of RAM and 512 gigabyte NVME SSDs. Yes, this is a 14-inch model, but the differences in size and weight from 12-13-inch ones are minimal (and the weight with the thickest battery is identical to that of the X200). This seems to be the last laptop in the series with wide possibilities for upgrading: you can install a combination of NVME SSD and a conventional SATA drive, in addition to the built-in battery, you can connect an external one with which the laptop works reliably autonomously up to 12 hours.

A lot has changed in 10 years. The processor became quad-core, but acquired features unprecedented earlier: it is capable of much, but only the first 30 seconds, and then the abilities decrease. The Core 2 Duo in the X200 is slow by today's standards, but it delivers stable performance for a long time. Due to this (but not only) the battery life has increased, the screens have become brighter, data storage systems - faster, more memory. Everything was done so that the browser does not slow down, you could process forty-megapixel photos in Adobe Lightroom (with decent speed) and rotate the video in 4K resolution in Adobe Premiere (and here you are lucky). How do the benchmarks chosen by me show this difference? Ancient PCMark 7 probably does not use all the features of the new hardware, but still shows a result 2.7 times greater.

The most interesting result was shown by the 3DMark 05 gaming benchmark. On the ThinkPad X200 it is stable, regardless of upgrades, it gives out about 1600 points. At T480 - 12 times more. The power of integrated video has grown more than the processing power of the processors themselves:

However, the increase is noticeable. The performance of one core increased 2.5 times, the total - almost five times.

The SSD in the T480 is not the most productive (the WD 520 model with a capacity of 512 gigabytes of the 2240 form factor is selected, since the main compartment has a large capacity SATA SSD). In addition, only two PCI Express lanes are reserved for this SSD laptop, not four. But even such a non-optimal option shows a 6-fold increase in read speed compared to the SATA2 interface. The write speed of small data blocks has grown more than three times. The results of all benchmarks are tabulated here .

How are numbers translated into real work experience? The X200, despite everything, is a reasonably fast laptop in all everyday tasks, of course, except for the web. In the browser, there are not brakes, but light thoughtfulness, especially if you open a lot of tabs. This laptop is 20% faster than my ThinkPad X301, and this is a serious difference for the old device. In X301, it is generally felt that everything possible was squeezed out of existing technologies, and even a little more. X200 on the contrary is made with a margin of safety. Of course, you should not load it with high-definition video processing, but otherwise it is an excellent working system. That seems to be all, the upgrade is over? No!

No not all

The performance of the ThinkPad X200 completely suits me, but the standard screen does not suit me at all. This is the TN-matrix, which is now put in the cheapest version of the laptop, and as of 2008 was the norm. There was no option for a better display in the X200 - the full-time IPS display appeared only in the ThinkPad X220 in 2011. What was then normal is terribly annoying: the screen has small viewing angles, and you have to constantly adjust it according to the angle of inclination, otherwise the image strives to go into negative:

There is a solution to the problem: in the neighboring X200 Tablet model, a BOE / Hydis screen was installed, made using AFFS technology (a type of IPS). In X200, it is installed without additional modifications if the standard screen is equipped with a warm tube fluorescent backlight. It’s easy to find out: just look at the sticker on the bottom of the laptop. If the text in small print indicates that the laptop “contains mercury”, then everything is in order. If there is no mercury, then you have a LED-backlit display, and you will have to change the inverter.

When replacing the screen, you need to carefully detach the cable from the old panel - it is common for both the display and the webcam above it. Everything else is quite simple, you just need to carefully lay out the wires of the wireless antennas again. Result:

Unlike the previous ones, this upgrade was not entirely successful. The matrix came from China, and its backlighting is slightly uneven. This can be experienced, but the brightness of the screen turned out to be slightly worse than that of the standard version, although it should be higher. Apparently this is a used screen with high mileage. Indoors, it is in any case better than the original display. But in general, I am thinking of replacing the backlight - either with the new CCFL, or immediately with LED.

Final touches: changing the keyboard to a new one. Without stickers and with a normal American layout. I put a new pipkanozzle on trackpoint, preferred concave shape. I glue the rubber feet that have been lost to me on the bottom. Now it seems ready! This is the first laptop in my collection, reassembled almost completely. From the original, there were only wireless modules, wires and a housing. This is the ThinkPad X200 in the highest possible configuration. With an excellent screen, quite light, and long-lasting (6-8 hours) running on battery power - it was also possible to find a new original one, manufactured in 2014, but retaining the factory capacity. The restoration is completed, it remains to wait for the moment when this laptop will become a real rarity. In the meantime, you need to make the transition to fully open source software. The Libreboot BIOS firmware requires a programmer, and this is a new topic for me. I’ll talk about the transition from closed source to open source next time.