I also still have a T400 chugging along with Arch. It got put in storage for a few years until I dug it out while recycling some other junk and realized it still had considerable life in it.
I just set someone up with a T420 with a few upgrades and it's a fantastic value. Hardest part was finding a source for the rubber HD rails needed to swap a 7mm tall SSD in place of the original 9.5mm platter drive. It was technically a downgrade from a newer thinkpad laptop that they had, but the T420 is just a better machine from fit/finish/touchpad/upgrade/repair perspectives.
If anyone has advice on swapping the screen on a T420 please point me towards it - the T420 screen is, for me, the only negative.
> If anyone has advice on swapping the screen on a T420 please point me towards it - the T420 screen is, for me, the only negative.
There's a lot of people swapping them (one example [1]), but I don't know if there's a consensus on which are the best options, and there's quite a few. I think the T420 and the X220 are by far the best options for reasonably modern but not yet ruined Thinkpads, but for both of them the screens are definitely the weak points.
I just set someone up with a T420 with a few upgrades and it's a fantastic value. Hardest part was finding a source for the rubber HD rails needed to swap a 7mm tall SSD in place of the original 9.5mm platter drive. It was technically a downgrade from a newer thinkpad laptop that they had, but the T420 is just a better machine from fit/finish/touchpad/upgrade/repair perspectives.
If anyone has advice on swapping the screen on a T420 please point me towards it - the T420 screen is, for me, the only negative.