I’m still at my home away from home, and the next piece of tech needing some maintenance is this slightly battered but much loved Lenovo X220. In my defence, it was like this when I bought it.
Welcome to Esk Computers, I’m Scott and today we’re checking out this fifteen year old laptop to see if it can serve a useful purpose in 2026.
I had this dual booting Windows and MacOS, back in the heyday of Hackintoshing. Ironically, the ancient installation of OSX lasted longer than the Windows installation, but now neither are booting. That’s probably a bootloader error which is fixable, but I’ve other plans for this.
First, let’s open her up, make sure it’s clean, and replace the delicious thermal pasta. Unfortunately this does mean disassembling almost the entire laptop, so I did test it was needed before starting this. I mean, it’s fairly straightforward to pull apart and there’s design niceties like all the internal screws being the same length, same for the external screws, so it’s hard to go wrong, but creating this pile of parts for semi-regular maintenance seems sub-optimal.
It’s powered by 2011’s Intel Core i5-2520M, the Sandy Bridge generation, which in those days meant a two core, four thread part. It’s clocked at 2.5 GHz and draws 35W. It’s currently got 16GB of DDR3 RAM, and at some point I replaced the 3G WWAN card with a 120GB mSATA SSD to complement the 2.5″ 240GB SanDisk SSD. This was useful for dual booting, but I currently have more use for this as an external SSD, so it’s coming out. The mSATA card is slower, but stll workable, and large enough for what I have in store for it.
It comes with Gigabit Ethernet, a 802.11n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 3.0 card, a palaeolithic era VGA port, a DisplayPort, an SD Card reader, and an ExpressCard/54 slot. I’m using this ExpressCard to provide some USB3 ports, which I don’t think gives full speeds, but it’s faster than the USB2 on the motherboard. It also gets worryingly warm so I tend only to plug it in when I need it.
Primarily I’m looking to get this operational again through the magic of Linux.
There’s a good number of really lightweight distributions that get the most out of low end hardware, but despite the age I think this still has the horsepower to deal with flashier front ends. I normally default to an official flavour of Ubuntu, but so far I’ve not tried Zorin OS, so let’s see what that Ubuntu based distro is like. My body is not ready for Arch Linux.
Installation was uneventful and frankly boring enough that I’ll lightly skip over it, with it happily taking over the 120GB drive, installing the necessary drivers and most of the keyboard shortcuts for controlling the hardware. The only significant one that doesn’t seem to work out of the box is the screen brightness. I’ve not also not tested the fingerprint reader, but to be honest I haven’t found a need for it.
So, why bother with this, apart from the general principle of the thing? After all, this is now a backup of a backup computing device, it has earned a bit of a rest, but I think there’s still a use for the little fella.
The Lenovo laptop keyboard is still one of the best typing experiences you can have in a relatively small form factor, so it’s still great for battering out scripts for these videos, and small enough to be comfortably usable anywhere in the house. That’s mainly why we’re going through this exercise, this is still one of my favourite devices to write on, and so still has a place in my digital life.
It was, I think, the last of the Thinkpads to use this style of keyboard, the later ones moving to a chiclet style keyboard that’s by all accounts also good, but I’m not alone in really liking this one. Also, who doesn’t love a good mouse nipple? These should be standard issue on all laptops, and certainly any where the trackpad is compact to the point of uselessness. There’s no backlight on the keyboard, but there is this adorable little light built into the scene bezel that shines down on it.
Speaking of the screen, it’s useable, but display technologies have come a long way in fifteen years. It’s a 12.5-inch 1366×768 panel, and like a lot of TN panels from the era it could do with having better viewing angles, being a bit brighter and a bit higher resolution. There is a way to retrofit a panel from a later model on to this, but maybe not worth doing in the modern day.
I don’t really recall if the speakers were considered good at the time, I think not, and certainly by modern standards, they aren’t great. Behold, the quietest, thinnest sounding crab rave in the world:
CRAB RAVE
And the same’s true of the 720p webcam and internal mic what you are watching and listening to right now innit. Not great then, real bad now.
Obviously it’s a very old and worn battery by this point, but I’m only going to be using this as a glorified typewriter, so it’s not a high power draw activity. Even so, it could really use a replacement.
I did consider briefly re-installing Windows to run the same gaming tests as done on the other laptops, for comparison’s sake, but this was no gaming machine on its 2011 launch, and even less so now. The integrated Intel HD 3000 graphic solution is no gaming powerhouse. It’ll get away with most 2D games like Rimworld and FTL, but this is not a rig for Cyberpunking. Besides, I want to see if older games are working out of the box, give or take, in Linux given the strides in compatibility Valve have made with the Proton translation layer.
Unsurprisingly, this has no issue doing what I need it to do, which is batter plain text into it. So, mission successful, but let’s see how much else we can get out of this fifteen year old laptop.
Now, bear in mind all this is relative. So when I say it’s handling the usual office tasks in LibreOffice, I don’t mean to say it’s doing it every bit as well as high end Ryzen 9000 series processor, but I am saying that it’s doing it well enough that I don’t feel that it’s falling behind what my slow, feeble, aging brain is able to tell it to do. So, it’s handling office tasks fine.
In my opinion, if you’re not using Firefox and uBlock Origin for web browsing you’re doing it wrong. Well, I’ll accept alternate browsers less bloated than Chrome, or to be honest Firefox these days, but good ad blocking is non-negotiable. With this in place, it’s perfectly able to browse the modern web. Streaming video from YouTube also works absolutely fine, either in 1080p or the 720p that’s closer to the panel’s resolution.
The reason I retired this machine from full time use, as it happens, was photo editing. Not to say that it can’t do it, it’s just that the older integrated graphics did not support the DirectX features that the Windows graphics software I was using at the time required. Although the same software’s Mac version did still work on the Hackintosh side, so that’s weird. At any rate, I’m not sure that Darktable and GIMP are direct replacements for my currently favoured ON1 and Affinity Photo but they can get the job done.
I’ve recorded and edited podcasts on this before, so audio processing in the likes of Audacity and Reaper is still perfectly viable. Video editing I’m less sure of, certainly DaVinci Resolve would be a bit heavy for it even if you could convince it to work with ancient integrated graphics, but for the simpler stuff like I do at 1080p, Kdenlive can work. I hastily re-assembled a previous video from some exported clips from Resolve, which isn’t quite the same as doing it from scratch but enough to prove the point that it can be done with a bit of patience for the odd bit of lag, and an export time of 18 minutes for the 10 minute video isn’t even all that bad.
Gaming then, and again, this isn’t a gaming machine, and it’s fifteen years old, so let’s be somewhat realistic. As expected, FTL and Rimworld still work perfectly well, so that’s me sorted for the next few years.
Let’s at least try a bit of 3D. This lot, if memory serves, should work halfway reasonably at low settings under Windows, but I’d like to see how Valve’s lauded Proton compatibility layer handles some older titles on low end hardware.
2001’s Max Payne 1 720p High settings sat above 30 fps, mostly in the 40’s, and would be perfectly fine to play through.
Emboldened, I jumped forward to 2010’s Fallout: New Vegas at 720p lowest settings which fares significantly worse with a slideshow experience, at least when it’s not crashing Steam or spending hours compiling Vulcan shaders. I’m sure I’ve had this and the upcoming games running on the original GPD Win under Windows, so it’s not looking great for this low end Linux experiment.
2008’s Burnout Paradise at 720p low settings struggles with the menu screens, and never quite managed to get into gameplay.
2007’s Bioshock even at 480p resolution, low settings is measured in seconds per frame, not fps, so best avoided.
Maybe we’ve being a bit too optimistic. 2004’s legacy release of Half-Life 2 surprised me by not launching at all. The current version which was mildly updated I think for the 2024 anniversary needed to be changed to an older compatibility mode but then gave a pretty solid 60 fps. That’s more like it.
Here’s the first Deus Ex game, the pride of Y2K, running at 1024 x 768 as was the style at the time, getting a decent 30ish fps.
2003’s Midnight Club II joins the not particularly exclusive “didn’t work” club. I don’t think this OS and Proton is the right mix for retro gaming, on this hardware at least.
Framerate is a bit less critical in turn based games, so I thought I’d give Shadowrun Returns a go. After again changing compatibility mode it boots, but takes forever to load. Well, five minutes. The single digit framerate is challenging, but if it was your only way to play it would be workable. Admittedly, I’m glad I have alternatives.
Ah well, if nothing else, there’s always Peggle. It’s not exactly fair to judge the X220 as a gaming machine, particularly when running games that weren’t designed to run on this operating system, but I thought it’d be interesting to try anyway. Mixed results, to be charitable.
So, what have we learned here? Well, I never claimed to be a teacher, but if there’s one recurring theme across the videos I’ve made it’s don’t let anyone tell you that your hardware is obsolete as long as it’s doing what you need it to do. Sure, this X220’s not going to run the latest games or run AI inference models locally, but there’s still plenty of fun games it can run, alongside all the usual computing tasks up to and including 1080p video editing.
Newer hardware will do this better, and more besides, obviously, but that’s not the point. If all you have access to was this Lenovo X220, there’s not all that much you won’t be able to do with a bit of patience and willingness to learn leaner, more efficient tools. Of course, my use case for this machine is now really quite limited, but it’s refreshing to see how much more it’s still capable of at fifteen years of age.
Given the ongoing dumpster fire that is the market for new computer components, it’s reassuring to realise that as long as we can keep older hardware running, we can keep creating and producing without acquiescing to the nightmare of cloud computing as a service. You’ll own nothing and like it is a threat, not a promise.
I’ve not used Zorin OS for long enough to give you a proper review of it, but on first impressions it’s marrying the rock solid Ubuntu foundation with a front end that’s much closer to a modern version of what Windows used to be. Clean, intuitive and powerful. I like it, and it’s worth looking into if you’re worried by the end of support for Windows 10, or concerned by the never-ending slow motion car crash of Windows 11.
I’ll let you make your own mind up on whether or not it’s fair to say that this Lenovo X220 is still going strong at fifteen, or if it’s ready to be put out to pasture. If you ask me, I’ll tell you I’m still quite happy to have it. I’ll revisit this in another fifteen years and give you an update.
Until then, If you have any questions or want further details please leave a comment down below, and if you enjoyed this videotronic missive then consider subscribing. Until next time, take care of yourself, and each other.