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+---
+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