My ThinkPad and I

The Succession

My first ThinkPad — in fact, the first computer I could truly call my own — was a ThinkPad X220i. My father "passed it down" to me when I was in middle school. Back then, I didn't know a thing about specs. All I knew was that I finally had my own computer.

The Beginning

Nearly a decade of memories has grown hazy. As I recall, this machine originally shipped with a second-gen Core i3 and came preinstalled with 32-bit Windows 7. At the time, I didn't even know how to reinstall an operating system. Whenever the computer slowed down, I just kept clicking the 360 Speedup Ball over and over. When the hard drive filled up, I was foolish enough to go into the C drive and start deleting files — miraculously, the system never crashed.

Later, I got a bit obsessed with virtual singers and decided to install VOCALOID, only to discover it didn't support 32-bit systems. So after much fumbling around, I reinstalled 64-bit Windows 10 myself. I think that was the first time I ever installed an OS from scratch — using the notorious Laomaotao PE, no less (laughs). But in the end, I never really learned VOCALOID. I skimmed through a couple of tutorials half-heartedly and shelved it. As always, a flash in the pan.

Stubborn Loyalty to Win10

I have to say, I genuinely love Windows 10. Even now, both my main machine and my work machine still run Win10. All those flashy controls in Windows 11 strike me as bloated and unfamiliar. Perhaps it's sheer stubbornness — or perhaps the X220i left too deep an imprint on me.

Gaming

The X220i's performance could be compared to a grandma pulling a semi-trailer — huffing and puffing but barely moving. That low-voltage second-gen i3, even after I later swapped in a third-gen i5, was at its core still an office machine no matter how much I tinkered. No dedicated GPU, no high-refresh screen — just a single integrated graphics chip shouldering everything.

But back then, none of that mattered. I huddled in front of this little ThinkPad's 12.5-inch screen and powered through quite a few games. First came Minecraft — graphics turned all the way down, render distance dialed to minimum, version 1.12.2 with the Twilight Forest mod still only scraping 40 to 50 FPS. Then came Brawlhalla, which managed to run smoothly enough, and I played it for quite a while. Though to be honest, I ended up playing that one even more on the Switch later on.

Looking back now, the X220i's anemic performance became, in a strange way, a kind of filter. Triple-A titles were out of the question. What it could run were mostly pixel-art, small-scale games. Seventy percent of all the PC games I've ever played in my life were on this machine — all of them seemingly crude, yet rock-solid in their gameplay design. This might be the direct reason for my fondness for pixel art aesthetics. The spirit of exhausting every possible trick just to get a game running — that may have been more precious than the games themselves. After I got my ASUS TUF A15, capable of running anything smoothly at high settings, I found myself launching games less and less often. (Alright, fine — I still played plenty.) It's as if games, once effortlessly accessible, lose their sense of urgency.

The Ship of Theseus

From that point on, this laptop could fairly be called a "cyber Ship of Theseus."

It went through a cracked screen, a drop that shattered the casing — I bought replacement parts on Taobao and swapped them myself. The screen was replaced, but the resolution remained 1366x768, and I think it was still one of those eye-straining TN panels. Later, I swapped the motherboard for one with a third-gen Core i5. After that, ThinkPad's signature rubberized coating finally succumbed to the passage of time, turning sticky. A crack formed across the C-side palm rest, so I went ahead and ordered an entire shell kit from Taobao — practically the whole machine was rebuilt.

To this day, the only original part left seems to be the keyboard.

The keycaps have been polished to a mirror-like shine, some letters rubbed faint beyond recognition. But press down, and there's still that crisp, clean rebound. The legendary quality of the seven-row keyboard speaks for itself. So deeply influenced by the ThinkPad keyboard layout, for a long time after switching to a new machine, I couldn't get used to the Fn and Ctrl keys being swapped. Every time I reached for Ctrl+C, my pinky would instinctively go for that bottom-left corner — and hit Fn instead.

Still the Same Machine

Sometimes I wonder: after all these replacements, is this X220i still the same one I started with?

It's been with me for nearly ten years. Countless programs installed, countless photos stored. Every time I flip it open, the screen lights up, and the keyboard light (the X220i doesn't actually have a backlit keyboard, just a ThinkLight) softly illuminates those familiar, mirror-polished letter keys — and I feel it's still the same machine.

A Decade of Hard Labor

In truth, it's only been in the last half year or so that it's finally gotten a break. When I count the years, this machine has been a workhorse in my hands for at least a decade.

In 2021, I switched to an ASUS TUF Gaming A15, offloading gaming and daily use to the new machine. But I couldn't bear to retire the X220i. I turned it into a DIY Synology NAS, stuffed an old SSD and HDD into it, and let it sit quietly in the corner as a little NAS. It ran 24/7, the fan occasionally spinning up softly for a moment before settling back into silence. During that time, our family's photo backups, movie downloads, and temporary file storage all relied on it quietly holding the fort — all the way through the end of 2024. Later, I moved it to my workshop, keeping it on standby 24/7 so I could glance at PCB layouts whenever I needed to. It wasn't until after last year's October holiday, when the workshop was renovated, that it was finally and fully retired to this day.

I'll leave it here for now. I'll add more if anything else comes to mind.