It was around 4 o'clock in the afternoon, I had just driven around an hour away from my house to meet a man in a supermarket. This definetly sounds like a drug-deal, but it was not. I was after a Lenovo ThinkPad X230, one of the sweethearts of the Lenovo cult, and one of the last models to have a keyboard that appeases the keyboard snobs that used to love the older ThinkPad keyboards. I fall more or less within that community, as I am slowly starting to descend into the madness that is the custom keyboard scene. But I digress. I meet "the man" by a coffee-shop near the supermarket - he is sitting inconspicuously at the back of the shop, sipping on what looks like a very watered down Cappuccino. I wave awkwardly, not 100% sure this is the person I am looking for. He nods back. Ok, this is on. After exchanging a socially acceptable amount of pleasantries and small-talk - the weather was nice that day - I ask him to see the goods. From a very used looking, but well taken care of, leather messanger back the slides out a big chungus of a laptop. Before the X230, my daily driver was a Lenovo X1 Nano; at around 0.9 kg it is definetly thin and dainty compared to the X230. The laptop was in great condition, as most of them that are decently taken care of are. Afterall, this is a tank of a laptop. The only visible issue with it is a hairline fracture mark on the top left corner of the plastic cover surrounding the screen. For a laptop released in 2012, this is impeccable. But, why the X230? Why buy such an old, thick, laptop when today there are options around 1/4 its weight and thickness that are at least 2x as powerful? The answer is simple. Because it offers such a beautiful and easy platform to mod a laptop to your hearts desire. Do you want an external antenna? Easy, just drill a hole and add a connector. Do you want a FHD screen? There are many mods for it available. The X230 comes completely apart if you so desire it to. As I had never modded a laptop before, this was definitely the way to go. Plus, the older Lenovo's have a reputation of being tanks. It's no wonder they were chosen by Nasa in the mid 90s to be the laptop of choice of the International Space Station - although here the ThinkPads were still owned by IBM.
The day I got it I replaced the HDD that was inside it for a SSD and installed Arch with DWM on it. The SSD plus the lighweight nature of suckless software made the old-guy a rocketman. This thing could keep up with all the basic tasks my X1 Nano did. I used it "stock" for a few more months, procrastinating all I had to do to it. On my initial list were some simple mods like changing the screen and keyboard layout (it came with a layout that I am not used to). But, after finally upgrading my home WiFi to WPA3-Personal, the ThinkPad decided not to cooperate. Initially I thought the issue was with wpa_supplicant, as I had read that sometimes you must force it to use sae encryption because it will not do it automatically. Hence, I created a config file for it and attempted to run it directly, without NetworkManager. It failed again. "Secrets were required but not provided." I guess the debug log was also a secret because it was very sparse. I did some more research, and concluded the culprit must be my hardware. In fact, the Intel Centrino Advanced-N 6205 I was rocking did not seem to support the newer ieee implementations that allow for WPA3. So, off we go to buy a wpa3 capable chipset. This time I decided to order, I was not about to drive to another shady pickup location just for a wifi chipset. I know Lenovo BIOS is infamous for being restrictive, there are only a handful of chips that are allowed, and even if they are but were used in a Laptop that is not a Lenovo it will get blacklisted by the BIOS. Hence, I confirmed adamantly with the the seller that this chipset came from a Lenovo laptop. He said yes.
I was too naive. As soon as I boot my X230 I am greeted with a incompatible chipset message. Shit. What to do now. Back we go to Google, where I discover 1vyrain. As a side note here, I knew of corebooting the X230, but was reluctant to try it because of the two chipset architecture for the BIOS. As I have never flashed a BIOS by physically connecting to the chipset, I thought I better try that for the first time on a single chip. Especially because I wanted to disable Intel ME and on the X230 dual-chip this becomes a little more involved. Anyways, 1vyrain is a tool created by n4ru, and according to his github, 1vyrain is "Software-based "jailbreak" allowing all ivybridge-based xx30 thinkpads to softmod custom bios images." This is exactly what I need. 1vyrain requires you to be at a specific BIOS version or earlier, and if not you will have to downgrade your BIOS to match a version it can exploit. Thankfully, my X230 was two versions below what was required for 1vyrain, and hence the process should be straightforward. Flash the image using dd or Rufus to a USB drive, then boot into it using legacy boot and follow instructions. Sounds simple enough. I flash 1vyrain to my thumb-drive and boot into it. 1vyrain gives you the option to select a custom BIOS image as well through the web. But that was not what I was after for now. I just wanted to unlock my BIOS, and that was the first option available. I select it, and 1vyrain goes to work. A couple seconds after my computer goes to sleep, a normal part of the process, and upon waking up it finishes flashing the custom bios. I get exstatic. This was simple enough.
The time was now around 1 am, and I had just finished flashing 1vyrain. I boot my laptop excited to test my wifi card and….I am greeted by a supervisor password. WTF. I try all passwords I can think off (it has a 3 try limit then reboot so this took a while). Nothing. Shit. Back to the FAQs. There is a section on supervisor passwords, and the FAQ starts with … "You fucked up…or someone else did." Well, that is nice to hear. Apparently 1vyrain can bring back supervisor passwords if they were once saved in memory. I had not set a password and disabled it, as it was recommended, because I was told this computer had never been blocked by a password by the seller - and since it was unlocked when I got it, I did not question it. Doctor House was right again - "Everybody lies." A little more searching and I find two options: 1) I can use a SOIC8 chip writer to write all 0s to EEPROM, which would clear the supervisor password from memory, or 2) I could use a screwdriver or another metal object to short pins 5 and 6 (SDA and SCL respectively) of the security chip on boot and that would temporarily write 0s to EEPROM and allow me to access the BIOS without a supervisor password. How cool is that!? This was slightly harder than expected because of timing issues, but overall it worked like a charm. After around 40 minutes trying I finally suceeded in booting the PC without the bios password. The process just took a while because of the weird angles required to get the timing right - from hitting the power button on the right side of the keyboard to getting the screwdriver perfectly in place as soon as an image is drawn on screen.
With 1vyrain finally installed, and a booting computer, it was time to check if the WPA3 connection would finally close. I decided not to edit anything in wpa_supplicant, but allow NetworkManager to work its magic through nmtui. It worked! HABEMUS NEXUM! That first ping coming in was glorious. With this tested and out of the way, the last step in upgrading the wifi module is buying a Wifi 6 card from Aliexpress. I chose to buy the AX200HMW chipset, as that was recommended by n4ru as well as a multitude of people on reddit and the ThinkPad forum. Once that arrives, I will update this section with some speed tests.
Now it was time to re-paste the CPU. This process was quite straightforward and has been very well documented by all modders in the past. Pasting the CPU requires to completely dissasemble the laptop (with an exception of the screen). This results in just a plastic shell being left behind.
Seeing the thinkpad like this made me want to paint or dye it somehow, although that will for sure be a project for the future. Once I applied the CPU paste, all that was left was to clear some dirt off the CPU fan - although I must admit it was suprisingly clean given the age of the machine. Re-pasting the CPU improved my temps by around 8 degrees celsius, keeping the CPU around 40 when not doing much. I will have to run some better benchmarks and link the results here.
Last but not least came the screen. This is a big quality of life improvement and I think the most worth it mod for anyone buying and using an older laptop. Not only is it incredibly easy to do (without the FHD mod), but it takes around 5 minutes total. You don't have to open the whole computer, just the screen encolsure which makes the process rather safe as well if you are worried about screwing something up. Just remove the plastic casing of the screen, unscrew four screws holding the screen together, replace the screen with the newer, better, IPS panel, and connect the new screen. Done. The screen quality now is noticeably better, more crisp, deeper blacks and better colors.
