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ThinkPad T440p Is My New (Bulky) Travel Companion

This article is a transcript of a video that you can watch by clicking the thumbnail below. Hence, certain statements may not make sense in this text form, and watching the video instead is recommended.

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/rvhj9ueJsfs/hq720.jpg

Intro

I’ve touched many neighboring ThinkPad generations, but have purposely avoided ThinkPads from 2013. Fast-forward to today, and I’m excited to restore and upgrade one for myself, and I couldn’t have been more excited about it.

I Had Several Reasons to Stay Away

The ThinkPad T440p is very popular among enthusiasts, but I’ve stayed away from it for a couple of reasons:

  1. The first is the cursed TrackPad, or as they call it, the “clunkpad”.
  2. And then, everything that it had to offer was already covered by one or more ThinkPads in my fleet.

I had already covered pretty much all the neighboring generations as well:

  1. The oldest that I’ve gone in that era of T-series ThinkPads was the T420, and my favorite design, the T420s
  2. Then there’s this T430 that I’ll probably talk about in a future video, and the W530 that I restored, beefed up, but could not utilize within my fleet, given the presence of the T15g Gen 2
  3. I also tried a couple of T450 examples that I did not enjoy
  4. I had a T460 at work (during my pre-ThinkPad years), and a T460s that I found to be a perfect travel ThinkPad, but passed it on to its new owner
  5. I also got to try several T470 examples that were pretty good, though I could never try a T470s.
  6. Finally, I had a T480 at work that I had a love-and-hate relationship with

So that left me with only that one odd model year that never appeared interesting to me. Now, we’re not talking about an X240, T440, or W540. We’re not even talking about the X240s (the rare variant from Japan) or the T440s. We’re talking about the T440p, which, in my words, was a spin-off, similar to how my T15g was different from T15 and T15p of its time. I seem to have a thing with these limited spin-offs, I think.

The ThinkPad T440p

This machine has a lot too many unique features that make it different than the other counterparts, and are difficult to ignore.

  • The service panel is easily accessible behind only two screws
  • The CPU can be upgraded with a 4-Gen Intel Core i7 Quad-Core
  • It’s old enough to be upgradeable, and modern enough to be used in 2025, if you’d like
  • It was the only ThinkPad from around that time without the Lenovo PowerBridge system that I could never truly appreciate

Early Impressions

I expected it to be heavier, but when it finally arrived in the mail, I loved it for the dimensions and weight. I found it to be OK for something to be traveled with, and time will tell. This one also reminded me of the rectangular charging connector that I haven’t been using much lately. The hinges are greyed out with a darker shade of grey, and the speakers are hidden below the unit, right below the trackpad.

The clunkpad wasn’t all that bad, but I decided to replace it with a better one anyway, and the 1600x900 screen was usable as well.

Initial State

As far as it goes for the state of the machine, I’d say it was OK.

  • The battery arrived dead, but seemed to charge to 73% of the original capacity, which was better than my expectations. This is Nobara Linux from a live USB disk, BTW.
  • The keyboard felt inconsistent in terms of how different each key felt, and it was a non-backlit keyboard
  • The palmrest was broken in one corner, but at least the damage was limited to a single replaceable part
  • There were missing screws so the service panel was even easier to open than it was intended to be
  • Finally, the machine was dirty as expected

Overall, I’d call this a good find, and I knew I could use this as a platform and take it beyond its original glory, which is exactly what I’ll talk about next.

First Things First

I wanted to start with getting this thing ready for fixes and upgrades, and I started with cleaning it inside-out, at least as deep as I needed to go before I replace the parts. Many of these parts would get replaced anyway, and this won’t be the only cleaning session for this machine, but at least I’d be comfortable working with the machine. The thermal repaste reminded me of the HP ProBook 4540s, and the absence of the two screws made it pretty similar. Wait, is that an Nvidia GPU? I guess it doesn’t matter I won’t be using proprietary drivers on this one anyway. Thankfully, I had a bunch of spare screws, and these two longer ones seemed to fit perfectly. With this, the machine was back to stock and ready for the next steps.

Spare Parts

Before we proceed, let me list down the spare parts I ordered for this machine:

  1. A replacement palmrest with a fingerprint reader, which also came with a pretty worn-out trackpad, leaving me with two clunkpads
  2. A T450 trackpad, which also came with its own palmrest and a few other things
  3. A backlit keyboard, as in the absence of the ThinkLight, there needs to be at least some illumination
  4. A Storage caddy that’s different than the ones I had worked with before
  5. A 2.5” SATA 512GB SSD, as I have some plans for this machine
  6. A pair of 8GB DDR3 SODIMM RAM modules to bump up the memory to the max
  7. A rectangular-pin power adapter that I wanted, but I received the wrong one. Let us assume for this video that I did receive the correct one, while I use one I had lying around, as it is so hard to align the arrival of so many parts from so many different sellers, and for everything to be working and be a perfect fit. I’ll order another one soon and place this back with the ThinkCentre.
  8. A smaller aftermarket battery that would reduce the dimensions and weight, and given that the stock one is running at only 73% capacity, the difference in runtime shouldn’t be that significant mathematically.
  9. An FHD IPS screen, as that would make the 14” screen way more usable

At this point, the total value of the machine, including the spare parts, was around 5 times of what I paid for it initially, even after trying to save money with pre-owned parts and an aftermarket battery.

The Upgrade Process

There were too many things to do, and the T440p was unfamiliar, so I tried to perform multiple things at once in the order that I found convenient.

  1. I started with replacing the palmrest, for which I needed to extract it from this combined package. This thing also contained much of the frame from some other machine, and as we can see, even the serial number is here. I had to be careful with the fingerprint sensor cable, which I decided to steal as well, and though I’d try to use it on my machine. That would be interesting. Then I had to remove the trackpad as well, which after removing four screws, came right off, leaving only what I was interested in. I only left this mysterious thing in the old frame, which I’ll learn about someday soon.
  2. I realized that while I was doing that, I could also take care of the keyboard and trackpad, for which I had to extract the trackpad from this package. For the trackpad, I learned that there were two kinds, and I ended up ordering the Alps version, cancelling the order, and re-ordering this Synaptics one that came along with several other elements, including the palmrest and more. The good thing with this extraction was that I had already done a similar procedure on the other palmrest, so I knew exactly how to take this thing off.
  3. Removing the palmrest from the original machine wasn’t easy, and I may have broken a lot of tabs that day, including a piece of this pry tool, but at least the palmrest was finally out. I also realized that as my machine had a smartcard reader equipped and this other one didn’t, I had to swap this trim piece attached by two screws so that I’d have the feature with the new palmrest as well.
  4. I also need one last thing, which is a connector cable for the new trackpad, as the cables between the T440p and the T450 are different. So with that, I had everything I needed in the new assembly: the palmrest, with a fingerprint reader and a smartcard slot, and the T450 trackpad. All that was left was to put things together.
  5. For the fingerprint sensor, I learned that the cable needs to be routed all the way to the bottom and plugged in here. This took me the longest, but at least it took care of most of the difficult part.
  6. The storage caddy and SATA SSD were pretty straightforward.
  7. Next, I took care of the pair of 8GB RAM modules.
  8. I ran some quick tests to check if everything was working till this point. I also experienced the difference between the backlit and non-backlit keyboards in terms of the surface finish, just as I had been reading on Reddit.
  9. Once I was sure everything was working, I proceeded to upgrade the screen to finish it up, and that wasn’t all that hard, with only four screws involved. At this point, this wasn’t even the same machine that I had bought from eBay. After a few tests, I reinstalled the screen bezel.
  10. I switched out the battery with the smaller one, so the machine lost some weight, and was easier to move around and flip over.
  11. The final step was to install Void Linux and configure it like the rest of my ThinkPads.

Updates I May Do in the Future, but Not Now

Now this wasn’t the limit for the machine:

  1. I could at least upgrade the dual-core Intel Core i5 processor to a quad-core Intel Core i7. I’ve been exploring the options and reading reviews from people on which exact CPU to get. If you’d get “the best” CPU out there, the machine fails to cool it down, and you might end up having to upgrade the heatsink as well, and getting a 135W power adapter to feed power to the CPU. Most people settle with quad-core models that provide a balance between performance, power-draw, and heat, as the three go hand-in-hand. I’ll probably hold off on that for now. But when I do decide to go that route, I’m glad I installed a trackpad that doesn’t mention Intel Core-i5 anymore, so that wouldn’t be mismatching either.
  2. For WiFi and BT modules, I didn’t come across any modified BIOS like Middleton’s BIOS or 1vyRain, and the only way I’ve seen people do it is by using a device to flash it themselves. I’d probably hold off here as well for the time being.
  3. There are also other things like replacing the DVD drive with another SATA drive caddy, but I’d rather keep the optical drive for now. I’ll reconsider that in the future, if I keep this machine long enough.

Ship of Theseus

By the way, I’m sure you’ve heard of the Ship of Theseus paradox, and especially with so many parts having been swapped, that could be a thing here. However, at least the location where the serial number is printed still stays with the machine, unlike what happened on the Dell XPS M1210.

Also, I may need to find new homes for these spare parts as well, which includes two clunkpads, a broken T440p palmrest, a few elements from a T450, a keyboard, and an HD+ screen.

Resemblances

For comparisons with other ThinkPads, the closest that I have with me is this T430, which is a little bulkier, has a few extra benefits like the ExpressCard slot, a WiFi kill-switch, but some of the upgrades like the FHD screen aren’t even possible on the T430.

Hidden Feature

I also learned about a feature that isn’t talked about as much, which is using an M.2 SATA drive in the WWAN slot and booting into another operating system. This also taught me that not every M.2 drive is an NVMe drive, and there are some rare models like this one that are SATA within that familiar M.2 2242 form-factor. I picked up a 64GB one for myself for experimentation, and this one needed another spare screw to be secured in-place. And, it does boot from that drive, which is awesome! BTW, this is my second Nobara Linux installation, and it’s perfect!

Conclusion

So that was a lot of fun giving this T440p not only a new life, but also super-powers with a better keyboard, a better trackpad (with a fingerprint sensor now), a way better screen, and hopefully, that’s only a start.

I’ve been using this machine almost exclusively in the recent weeks, and I imagine this is very similar to what using a T480 with Linux would be like, except that this machine is considerably older, thicker, and weaker. I do not care what my wife would say about this one, but I absolutely love it as every impractical thing about this machine reminds me of its big brother, the W530, except this is slightly more practical in every possible way.

About the CPU and wireless upgrades, we’ll see if the future permits. Till then, this is going to be my travel companion, while my X1 Nano takes some time off and chills with the rest of the friends.