It's been years since I think about getting a small thinkpad.
All in all, they're tough little second hand machines with large batteries. And you can easily repair them since you can find parts about everywhere.

My huge gaming laptop with its 17“ screen is great for a load of things. But not for being easy to move around. My old 13” Macbook on the other side is easy to move everywhere but is far too old to run anything recent with its core2duo CPU.

So when someone proposed to sell me a X240 on mastodon, I just accepted.
The computer has seen better days but it's cheap and since I'm going to use it mainly as a small “on the road” machine… CPU is a i5-4300U with 8Gb RAM, it has the standard 1366x768px 12.5“ thinkpad screen with some rubbing marks on it from the keyboard, a QWRETZ keyboard with a missing 'I' key (replaced with the '^' key), some scratches on the case and a bunch of stickers on the back of the screen.

It came with windows 10 on the SSD.
As soon as I get more storage space, I'll put fedora as a dual boot. I want to be able to run natively some softwares.

Why fedora ? Because I've been using it for a while on other computers, I'm starting to get used to it. And it works well.

I'd like to install (in no particular order) :

• a belgian keyboard
• a second SSD on the M.2 free slot
• a large HDD or SSD to replace the current one
• a full hd IPS screen
• a new battery

Some of those parts are pricey but I don't need to buy them all immediately, the computer work as-is.

I could probably buy the official “M.2 extension” allowing to install a second SSD under the battery if I want to make it a huge mobile data storage.

In the end, it's the first upgrade I made on this computer. This one “lives” on the connector usually dedicated to the LTE/4G modem. This port is compatible with NGFF M.2 2242 SSD.
This kind of SSD isn't the most readily available now. On current computers the most frequent SSD form factor are NVME or SATA ones.

So I had to seach a bit and found some Orico branded ones. I got a 1To one for the X240 and it's going to be great. Installation took a grand 3 minutes at most.

In the end I now own a nice dualboot windows/fedora small laptop.

I didn't replace the keyboard. Only moved around keys to make it look like an AZERTY. I try to touch type most of the time. But with my dys* troubles it helps to have most of the keys on the right place.

I took a peek at keycaps prices… they charge 5€ for only one keycap. So maybe getting a 37€ belgian keyboard wouldn't be such a bad deal.

I already bought :

• a USB-C to “rectangle lenovo power connector”. I already own a small USB-C 65W powerbrick wich should be powerful enough since the original powerbrick is also 65W.
• new rubber feets since the computer is missing one.
• a screw kit because the case is missing one. (nothing moves but you never know)

I got my lenovo mx anywhere paired using bluetooth (because the X240 only has two of them).

I should get a mini displayport to HDMI adapter and eventually a small USB hub.