I’m thinking of picking up a used ThinkPad on eBay for cheap to serve as my daily driver. I’ll likely run LMDE, and primarily use it for web browsing, office programs, coding, and FreeCAD. Any recommendations on which model would best hit the sweet spot of capability vs price?
Could be. I do have some significant Thinkpad experience (going back to the IBM days) and I do know that they will not alter the model number regardless of what’s in the machine, but you can pull a build sheet from their website with the serial number. Do you know if your HPs could have had this happen? Was your distributor HP or elsewhere? (Not hating, just curious!)
Capacity loss over time is a decent idea. The 2nd Gen machine has an 11th Gen chip, vs 10th Gen in the Gen 1, and quiet possibly is able to burn more power quicker as well. Thinkpad power consumption is also definable in the BIOS or Vantage software for many of them, so those settings all could vary.
Normally I’d be happy to help troubleshoot this sort of thing but frankly I’m not sure OP was looking to chat.
The seller was some dude on Amazon, but both machines were new in box and were purchased in 2018 and 2019. The model is 15-br095ms for what it’s worth. It’s a Microsoft signature edition laptop so “less” bloat than other machines. Basically it didn’t have McAfee or norton.
At least for that line of HP machines, you had a 768p panel and a 1080p panel. Both are 1080p.
Also the 11th gen i5 is weird. Idk if mine was a dud or they all ran like this but mine was super power hungry. 33wh capacity and I got like 3 hours of battery life. When the battery was new (40wh) it was like 4-5 hours if I babied it. When I swapped in a new Ryzen motherboard, it ran cooler and more efficiently. I get 4 hours of battery life if I do normal stuff and it can run fanless. And yes I’ve repasted it when it had an i5.
For context, that old pavilion 15br laptop I was talking about had a motherboard replacement and I put a 15-br158cl motherboard in it so an 8th gen i7 and a Radeon 530. Not a particularly efficient gpu and an old cpu. It gets the same battery life. It’s got 2 drives, an older battery and it still beats the newer one. I could get that old i7 to sip power. I can’t get the new one to do that.