---
title: "Best Laptop - Lenovo T430"
date: 2021-10-11
draft: false
---
Some of you may not know this, but my daily driver for the past six years has
been a refurbished Thinkpad T430 that I bought for $200 when I was in middle
school. It's lasted through two school changes, countless road trips, and it's
soldiered through with only minor damage. Today, I want to go over why I
absolutely love this laptop, and why it's sold me on Thinkpads.
First things first, the design. Like most Thinkpads, the majority of the laptop
is flat black. The particular T430 that I have still has the older keyboard, so
it's extremely satisfying to type code or blog posts. The chassis feels very
sturdy, even though the screen likes to flop down if you shake it too much.
With enough equipment, I can fit three full hard drives in this laptop without
expanding the chassis. First, there's the standard drive bay behind the left USB
ports and the mini-DisplayPort. This is held in by one screw[^1], and I've
upgraded this drive twice while I've owned this laptop. Then, there's a slot for
an mSATA SSD beneath the RAM inside the chassis. Finally, and this is the most
wild thing I've ever seen on a laptop, the whole CDROM drive can be removed and
replaced with a whole number of things - but most importantly, a full 2.5" SSD
bay can be inserted.
This really cuts to the core of why I love this laptop so much. It's so easy to
pull it apart and fix or upgrade things. For example, even a laptop as durable
as this can get damaged after six years of heavy use. First, the screen started
to show lines down the left. I could work around this with clever tiling and
resizing windows. Then, the battery wouldn't last longer than half an hour. That
worked out fine, I just sat next to an outlet all the time. Finally, the battery
and charger completely stopped working, and I caved and bought an X1 Carbon.
While that laptop was sleek and modern, it lacks the repairability of the T430.
When I arrived at WPI and started earning money of my own, the first thing I
bought was a new battery and charger for the T430 off of Amazon for ~$30.
Swapped out the battery and plugged it in, and everything worked perfectly. The
screen I held off on for a while, because I wanted to make sure it wasn't just a
loose connector, but eventually I had to cave and I just ordered a newer LCD
panel with a better resolution off of eBay. It arrives on Friday, and I'll
update this post then with the outcome of the screen upgrade.
Try doing an LCD replacement on an X1, or any modern laptop. The laptop itself
will cost upwards of $1k each, and if anything breaks, you're straight out of
luck unless you still have a warranty. Every pain point that I've ever encountered
with this laptop is something that I can fix. When it arrived, it had a 128GB SSD. I
upgraded that without taking apart the whole chassis. Lenovo has published a
whole [guide][cruguide] on how to upgrade and replace components, and many of
them can still be found on eBay for good prices.
In short, the Thinkpad T430 is one of if not the best laptop ever made. Even
though it's seven (7!) years old, it can run any bit of software I throw at it
(including "modern" games like KSP, and video editing suites), and if anything
breaks there's enough documentation and materials for me to repair it myself.
You won't find anything else like that for this price point. A cursory Amazon
search shows that you can find refurbished T430s for around $300. For a laptop
that lasts, and you can repair yourself, that's the deal of a lifetime.
[^1]: More on that later
[cruguide]: https://download.lenovo.com/ibmdl/pub/pc/pccbbs/mobiles_pdf/t430_t430i_hmm_en_0b48304_04.pdf
