Upgrading From My Thinkpad T430s to a Dell Latitude 7300

My Lenovo Thinkpad's battery and it's internal battery are both dead or close to dead and I think possibly the power supply connector maybe dodgy too, so I was in the mood for an upgrade. I found this Dell Latitude 7300 on eBay from a reputable seller. It has a 8th gen Core i7 CPU and 24GB of RAM (8GB+16GB modules) which is more than any other machine I have, including my main desktop which only has 12GB of RAM. Cosmetically the only noticeable wear I have noticed so far are the long rubber feet it sits on are hanging off a bit, just needs gluing back on at some point.   

I had a good look through the settings In the BIOS and only needed to enable SMART reporting for drives. I noticed lots of useful settings in there, you can disable the webcam, mic, change backlit keyboard settings, enable boot from SD card etc. That's the optional MicroSD card reader, which is nice, though for me a full size one would have been more useful, but I suppose they went for that to save space, which is also obviously why Ethernet is missing too. I may buy a USB C Ethernet and card reader adaptor for it at some point. With slightly less ports than I am used to it does mean that the 7300 is very light compared to my old Thinkpad. Obviously having no optical drive also saves a lot of space and weight, it's not something I use often other than on my desktop machines. There's a USB 3 port on each side, a HDMI port and USB C for charging, alongside the old barrel connector for the old style power supply. And apparently you cannot damage the machine by plugging in both at the same time. This one came with a fairly compact LITE-ON USB C power brick. There's the usual Kensington lock connector, and also a Smart Card reader which I doubt I will ever use. This is the first laptop I have ever had with USB C charging, which I like because my phones use it too, so it makes things easier. 

The 7300 came with Windows 10 on it's 128GB NVMe SSD but there was no way I was keeping that garbage on this. I thought about upgrading the storage but just wanted to get Linux on it as quick as possible, I think 128GB should be fine anyway. 

I wiped out everything and installed KDE Neon. Everything went smoothly but I advise not leaving it long enough during the live session for the screenlock to kick in, because for some silly reason it requires a password, yet the Neon live user does not have a password set. If this happens, wait long enough for the install to have finished, then shut it down, or CTRL+ALT+F2 to a terminal and reboot it form there, that's the simplest solution. 

Anyway, the install didn't take long and upon reboot I had a nice crisp fresh KDE Neon install. And KDE really does look crisp on the 1080P LED screen, it's pin sharp, and feels much sharper than the one on my old Thinkpad, and has much better colours, the black actually look black! I switched the global theme to Breeze Dark as I find dark themes are easier on my eyes. And lastly I put the main panel at the top and a dock-like panel at the bottom of the screen.

I installed yakuake terminal VLC, Audacious, kubuntu-restricted-extras, gimp, wxMp3gain, krdc (remote desktop client) soundkonverter, synaptic (alternate package manager). KDE reports the battery health as at 69%. I have also installed lm-sensors as per usual and all temperatures are just fine under light usage though I did get a bit worried at one point while Dropbox was downloading loads of files and with a few tabs in Chrome, temperature on one core went up to just over 70, though that's still in acceptable figures according to Dell's site, and it hasn't happened again. It usually hovers around the 30 to 40 C area. I have also  changed the updates in Neon to the non-bundled variety, as it should be.  To disable offline updates, edit the config file /etc/xdg/discoverrc - for example using nano - and set it to off. Another tweak I do is add the 'Show Logout' and 'lock screen' options to the desktop right click menu.

Everything works out the box as with most Latitudes I have had, the keyboard and trackpad are decent, much better than on my old Thinkpad and is in good condition too. The backlight works fine, it's something I feel I cannot live without on a laptop or desktop these days. If you need to change the Fn key behaviour, pressing Fn + Esc toggles the Fn lock, allowing you to use the F keys without the Fn key.

For many minutes I thought there was something wrong with the webcam, but after a bit of googling I discovered that there's a simple little slider switch next to the webcam to enable and disable it. Although there are some KDE specific webcam tools, I find the app called Cheese is the best standalone Linux webcam app, it's very simple to use. It's not great quality compared with a smartphone camera of course, and not something I will use much, but it's nice to know it works. 

One slight annoyance is Discover keeps nagging me about a UEFI dbx update, and every time it supposedly updates, it still comes back again on reboot. I have tried updating on the commandline but I get an error, and I've searched online and not found a solution yet. 

On one cold boot it even did a firmware update but that has not made a difference. 

Update 30/06/2025 - A recent update to Neon has now fixed that UEFI dbx update issue.

Another bit of strange behaviour I had was when I closed the lid, it did not suspend/sleep, and continued to run as if the lid was never closed, which, if left for awhile, made the fans go full blast trying to keep it cool. After a bit of Googling I discovered that the previous owner had disabled the Lid Switch in the BIOS. 

Also one time when I manually Suspend I came back to find it had shutdown at some point, despite having plenty of battery left. I had just done some updates on KDE Neon so that could have caused that issue. When it does suspend and resume, it does so very quickly.

Overall I am very pleased with the Latitude 7300, it has a very nice bright screen, nice backlit keyboard, decent touchpad, and it's the first laptop that I have had that is significantly faster than my main desktop, in every way except possibly in graphics card power. It has twice the RAM and a much newer processor. The only thing of course is I do prefer the dual monitors on my desktop, though I could attach a monitor through HDMI.  I've mostly been using it for all the usual stuff I would do on my desktop, web browsing, image editing in GIMP, and bit of video editing in Kdenlive.  It's been particularly useful n the very hot weather when I don't want to run my main desktop machine. Hopefully it should last me awhile, and it runs so quickly I feel like I need to get a new workstation to match it! 

From Manjaro to KDE Neon on My Dell Vostro 3300

So there was a huge update on Manjaro recently to KDE plasma 6 and it killed Mkchromecast again on my Dell Vostro, but this time I wasn't able to get it working again. However I worked out how to get it working in 'buntu based distros, so I decided to switch it to my preferred 'buntu-based distro, KDE Neon. Neon is based on the Kubuntu LTS but with the latest KDE installed. The installer was even easier and smoother than it used to be, so after backing up stuff I wanted to keep, I installed Neon in about 5 or so minutes. This machine has an old hard drive but it still feels fairly snappy to use. 

One of the first things I like to do with KDE now is turn off the stupid Offline updates setting. Seriously KDE devs, this isn't Windows, I don't want or need to have updates run on shutdown! Linux doesn't need to reboot for most updates! I also switched to Breeze Dark theme, and moved the panel to the top, disabling the new floating panel setting. That's what I like about KDE, everything is configurable, unlike Gnome where they have a like it or lump methodology. And the search feature in Settings works very well. Also I discovered that my Dell Vostro has a back-lit keyboard, I accidentally hit the Fn keyboard shortcut to turn it on! 

I also installed all the usual items such as GIMP, Audacious music player, Filezilla, Cantata (mpd front-end) Yakuake (a drop down terminal) and Kubuntu-restricted-extras. In general this fresh install has gone very smoothly compared to an upgrade, though I did have a slight issue with menus not popping up from the system tray, Switching from Wayland to X11 at the login screen sorted that out. Another little tweak I do is re-enabling the Leave option in the desktop right-click menu. So, other than that slight issue, this fresh install has gone very smoothly, and I'll likely keep KDE Neon on this laptop until the hardware dies whenever that might be, this Vostro is a tough old thing.

I got a Dell Vostro 3300 for a bargain price and it works just fine after a few upgrades.

 A charity I used to volunteer from put a Dell Vostro 3300 on their eBay and idly just put the minimum bid on, 20 quid, thinking I would probably not get it, got outbid once, but then put a bid on an hour before it ended, won it with that 22 quid bid, absolute bargain! It's got a 2.27Ghz i3 CPU, and arrived with a single 2GB RAM stick and 320GB HDD installed. 

There's just two screws to remove to release the bottom panel to access Memory and hard drive and two screws to release the HDD. There's a Windows 7 COA under the battery but I doubt I will ever need that. I run Linux on all my laptops.

I then did a bit of musical chairs with parts in my other laptops. I took 8GB of RAM from a poorly Thinkpad X201 and put that in my 2012 Macbook Pro (been meaning to do that for a while) and put the MBP's original 4GB in the Vostro. Then I replaced the 320GB hard drive in the Vostro with the SSD from my Dell Latitude E6500, which has Manjaro KDE on. The E6500 is one of the oldest laptops I have in use and is a bit tatty, so the Vostro makes a good replacement for it. I won't bin the E6500, it'll go on the spares shelf. Once the SSD was in and everything put back properly, it booted up the Manjaro KDE install with no issues.      

The only slightly annoying downgrade from my other laptops, but particularly the E6500, is it only has VGA out rather than DisplayPort. There's an eSATA port which I doubt I will ever use, 2 USB 2.0 ports (one either side) and an Ethernet port. The trackpad is good, just as good as the one on my ThinkPad T430s and the keyboard is decent (though has no back light, like the Thinkpad does, though Dell did have one as an option on a slightly better spec model). 

The Vostro has a reasonably decent 13.3 inch anti-glare screen with a default resolution of 1366x768, which is a bit low compared to the 14 inch on the Thinkpad T430s, which runs at a very nice 1600x900 resolution. The Vostro was basically a midway point between the consumer garbage Inspiron range and the Latitude business range, so this laptop doesn't quite have the best components compared to Latitudes but is still a solid machine. In terms of other specs, it has a slightly slower i3 M350 CPU than the i5-3320M in the Thinkpad and a few less ports, and no USB 3. There's an SD card slot but no Express Card slot to add more ports. Overall, it's a handy little laptop, especially for just 20 quid! It runs Manjaro KDE perfectly fine, and is a useful replacement for the E6500, so I am pleased with it.

From a 2006 Macbook to a 2012 Macbook Pro, what a difference!

So, I got a mid-2012 MacBook Pro as a birthday present, yes I know what you're thinking, I'm a Linux man, why have a Mac? Well, right now, making music on Linux is tricky, the JACK control system is a pain to setup, still. I've always made music on a Mac, from my old PowerPC Macs - Powermac G4s, iBook G4 and Powerbook G4s - then eventually to my old white 2006 MacBook (which I got in 2016) and now this Macbook Pro. I still occasionally use a Powermac G4 MDD for older PowerPC-only music software. I have a whole bunch of tools and plugins I have collected over the years. This is the first time I have had a reasonably quick Mac that can run a recent version of Mac OS (and can be made to run the latest, Ventura), and up to date apps too. 

The mid 2012 is still the best choice on a budget, since it, if I remember rightly, was the last to have upgrade-able RAM, up to 16GB na done of the most repairable before everything became soldered and glued together. Mine currently has 4GB but it's still usable for what I want to use it for, Garageband and plugins. And that's pretty much all I plan to use it for, and for any other occasion where I can't find a way to run something on Linux. This MBP is in good condition, other than the rubber feet need sticking on a bit more firmly, they keep falling off! There's no obvious scratches or dents. It came with a replacement 60W PSU which works fine. 

The Macbook Pro came with Mojave installed on a 500GB hard drive, but I decided to upgrade it to an SSD and dual boot two Mac OS versions, Mojave and Catalina, so I can run older 32bit apps that Catalina cannot run. 

I took the SSD out of my old 2006 Macbook, which was already in two partitions (I had it dual booted for awhile but then stuck with just Lion and a data partition), and put it in the MBP. Then I attached the original HDD via USB and booted off it to install the two Mac OS versions on the SSD, including transferring settings and data off it.

The guts of the machine are accessed from underneath, by undoing a bunch of screws and taking the base off, I followed the guide on iFixit. I did also try putting the RAM from my old Thinkpad X201 in it, but it didn't seem to be compatible. One day I will get two decent 8GB sticks to max it out.  

The only thing I am not keen on, hardware wise, is the glossy screen (apparently they can be replaced with a matte one but I am not bothered enough to do that). The keyboard is decent enough and it's the first Mac I have had with one that  is backlit, as is my Thinkpad T430s too. I now miss having that whenever I use a laptop without it, such as my old Acer Chromebook 14.

The MBP feels slightly heavier than my Thinkpad T430s, due to the metal body, which takes a bit of getting used to when sat on my lap. It has almost the same CPU (2.5 GHz i5 instead of 2.6 GHz) and the same Intel 4000 graphics as my T430s.  Naturally the Thinkpad has more ports, it's a bit annoying having only 2 USB ports on this MBP. I usually have USB MIDI keyboard, M-Audio M-Track Solo external soundcard/input box and a mouse plugged in. I prefer the precision of a decent mouse over a trackpad. I've actually been lazily using an old Apple keyboard as USB hub! I should find or buy a proper hub sometime, though I'm sure I have one somewhere...        

I am not that keen on the Apple App Store, it feels kind of bloated and there's a load of paid for apps, including a "Pro" version of FileZilla that I didn't even know existed. Apparently it has a paid cloud service and other cloud plugins. The free version is not on the store but can be downloaded from their website. I've also removed a lot of apps off the Dock I don't plan to use like Apple Maps, Music etc, all I plan to use it for is music production.  

Although Garageband is right there in the App Store, it wouldn't let me download and install because Catalina is not new enough for the latest version. The newest version requires Monterey. I found version 10.3.1 elsewhere to download, to use on both Catalina and Mojave. A dual boot is a little inconvenient when you can't easily share stuff between them, particularly with file encryption enabled on Catalina. And I am still not really keen on Finder, it's a poor file manager compared to the powerful Dolphin on KDE that I am used too. Also, out the box, I miss certain open source tools, like wget on the command-line. To do ad that, you need to install MacPorts, which requires Xcode, which I can't install from the App Store because, yet again, Catalina is apparently not new enough! The newest version it can run is 12.4, old versions can be downloaded manually from the Apple developer site, it is a 10.86GB download.

It's nice to finally have a fairly up to date version of Mac OS that has the dark theme that older versions didn't have. I am not so keen on how Disk Utility seems to have been dumbed down compared to the version in Lion that I was used to.  Also, I chose to have two Mac OS versions so I could still run old 32 bit apps, but sadly Native Instruments B4 just does not show up as an instrument in Garageband, though it will run as a standalone app. it seems Native Instruments moved on and want you to buy their Komplete software and plugins. The organ emulator built into Garageband just doesn't match the B4. I can't seem to find any advanced settings for it. On the plus side, the newer Garageband has better drums, and generally better built-in instruments, I particularly like the Mellotron sounds they've added. 

I couldn't use this Macbook Pro for everything, but it's fine just for music production. Mac OS is just too restrictive for me, it feels like a straitjacket compared with the freedom of  Linux, particularly KDE Plasma desktop. If I don't like the default theme on KDE, then I'll change it, change the icons, change the titlebar theme, or even swap out KDE for something else if I want to. Whereas on Mac OS there's two themes (light and dark), a single set of icons and that horrible file manager, Finder. And as mentioned before, I really like Dolphin file manager on KDE and I don't like basic file managers like Nautilus and Nemo on Linux which are too similar in dumbness to Finder. Having said that, this 2012 Macbook Pro should hopefully perform its one job of making music for a good few years, particularly if I max out the RAM to 16GB and, at some point, use Open Core Legacy Patcher to make it run Monterey and/or Ventura. What I replace with it after that I don't know, but I'll use this until it dies, so watch this space!  

You can find my music on my Audius page.

        

Old But Gold: Lenovo Thinkpad T430s

I was getting tired of using the battered old Dell Latitude E6500 as my main laptop, and my Thinkpad X201 needs the fan replacing, so that's out of action, so I needed another laptop to use. Thankfully I managed to pick up a very tidy Lenovo Thinkpad T430s for a good price. It's in excellent condition for its age. It has a nice bright screen with no marks on it, an apparently not very old battery, and a replacement power supply, though I do have a Lenovo one that fits from my oldest dead Thinkpad. It has a very durable magnesium alloy and carbon-reinforced plastic construction. The screen bezels might be considered chunky but it helps with the durability. The T430 has a quad core i5-3320M CPU, 8GB RAM, and Intel HD 4000 graphics, 2 USB3 ports, one USB2 port, SD card reader, Mini Displayport, Gigabit Ethernet, a DVD-RW drive and came with a 500GB hard drive with Windows 10 installed, but that was the first thing to be ditched. 

Getting the Thinkpad up and running with Linux was as simple as swapping out the 500GB hard drive for the SSD from my old Thinkpad X201. It's just a case of removing the X201's little caddy and rubber mounts and putting the rubber mounts of the T430s on. The DVD drive can be replaced with an Ultrabay battery or second SSD/hard drive.

Once installed, the outer panel screwed back on, KDE Neon booted up and was ready to use. I then installed all the updates it had missed while being offline. 

The T430 has a nice bright screen and a great keyboard to type on with its island keys. It's also the first laptop I have had with a back-lit keyboard (Fn key + Space to turn it on and off). The textured touchpad takes a little getting used to, though I do tend to prefer a mouse on older laptops. It supports multi-touch gestures like pinch to zoom, in Linux you press Control while pinching. The keyboard layout is a little different to my older Thinkpads, and my Dell Latitude, with a smaller rectangular Return key, which also takes a bit of getting used to. Of course being a Thinkpad has the Track Point, or Nipple Mouse as I like to call it, but I always disable it, I have never got the hang of using them.

Thinkpads are well known for being Linux-friendly (though I am not sure about the latest ones), so it's no surprise that everything works out the box - shortcut keys, graphics etc. The keyboard layout was not set right on the first boot, likely because I had swapped the drive from another machine, but it's easy to change that in KDE settings, to generic US layout. Even the grainy built-in 720P 1.3MP webcam works out the box, I installed kamoso to test it out, which is in the 'buntu repos. Bluetooth also works perfectly out of the box with KDE.

I got just a little over 2 hours battery life with heavy usage - Facebook, lots of YouTube video playing - with the screen at 50% brightness. That's not bad for an old battery, though when new it would have lasted around 5 hours. The only slight oddity is sometimes when the battery is really low, and you plug the charger in, KDE sometimes reports that it is not charging, when it actually is, eventually after a moment or two it shows as charging. The optical bay can be replaced with an Ultrabay battery that apparently adds around 3 hours of usage.

If you find that under heavy usage the temperature go up to 75°C, it may help to place the T430 on a flat hard surface, rather than directly on top of your lap, I find it goes back to around 40 to 50°C depending on usage. It may also be worth cleaning out the fan too. It's got a bit warm a few times with YouTube, not helped by the hot weather at the moment. I already had Thinkfan installed to control fan speeds, and the config is very similar to the X201, there's a how to here to set it up. 

Another slightly annoying thing I have discovered is that there's an admin BIOS password on this T430s, which is always a hazard when buying secondhand laptops, you can get in without entering a password but you won't be able to change certain settings. Without the admin password you cannot change anything in the "Security" section of the BIOS apart from you can add a hard disk password. and you cannot change anything in the "Startup" section apart from Boot Mode (Quick or Diagnostics). If you need to choose a boot device though you can press F12 when starting up and choose what you want. The one thing I want to change at some point is enabling hardware virtualisation (Intel VT). There are a few workarounds as detailed here, but you should be very careful to follow them correctly for fear of bricking the laptop. Right now I really cannot be bothered to go through all that hassle until I absolutely have to.   

Apart from the odd minor niggle, I am pretty happy with this old Thinkpad. It's amazing how compact and fairly lightweight the T430s is (compared to a beast like my Latitude E6500), but still has a decent number of ports and room for a DVD bay too. And I prefer the size of the 14 inch screen on this to the 12.1 inch of the X201, that's a bit too small for my liking. 14 inch is the sweet spot for me. I love how snappy this laptop feels with KDE Neon, compared with my old Latitude E6500 and even my Chromebook. It's very quick to boot and I like how when it dims the screen after I have left it for a bit, it also turns the keyboard back-light off until I start using it again. The trackpad beneath the spill-resistant keyboard could be a bit better, but it's often that way on older laptops, I've been spoilt by the excellent trackpad on my Acer Chromebook 14. The T430s keyboard is superb to type on though. The T430s is a pretty sturdy laptop, and pretty quick considering it was released back in June 2012, 10 years ago at the time of writing, and I hope it will last me a few more years without going wrong, but only time will tell. 

Revitalising a Dell Latitude E6500 with an SSD

I have been playing about with a Lenovo ThinkPad W500 I was given awhile back, but I'm tired of it suddenly deciding to use the dead ATI graphics card every now and then. It's a real faff to get it going again and I really wanted a reliable Linux laptop to hand. I was going to put an SSD in it, but decided my Dell Latitude E6500 would be a better place for it, it's much more reliable, and I actually prefer the keyboard on the Dell. I have had it for a long time, but it has been set aside as a spare laptop for ages since I tend to use my Acer Chromebook 14 for general browsing the net while sat on the sofa. Sometimes there's one or two things that are not easily done on a Chromebook, so it will come in handy to have the Dell to hand. It has a P8600 (2.4Ghz) Core 2 Duo CPU, 4GB DDR2 RAM, Intel GM45 graphics and came with a 120GB hard drive.

I received a Kingston SSDNow A400 240GB SATA 3 Solid State Drive for my birthday and decided to put that in the Dell to pep it up a bit, particularly to make it boot faster. It's also actually twice the size of the Seagate Momentus 5400RPM hard drive that was in it, which I think was probably the drive it came with from new. I would like to up the RAM to the maximum 8GB but it would cost £30 for 2x 4GB sticks of DDR2. It's a shame it's DDR2 as if it was DDR3 I could've taken the RAM from the Thinkpad, and a DVD writer would be nice in it to replace the combi drive...but I digress...

  

On the first try, the rear set of mounting screws would not go in, but the drive fitted in. However on boot, it was not detected by the Latitude. So I popped it out and put it back in without the front cover and it went right in. The rear screws went in fine but the front ones did not... 

After some Googling and head scratching, I discovered that since the SSD is thinner, you need put a shim under the drive to make the connectors and screw holes meet inside. I cut and folded some of the thick card from the packaging and used that. The drive now fit snugly and the outer cover is on. Sorted!

I used to run Kubuntu on the Latitude but these days I prefer KDE Neon, as it has a much newer version of KDE, which is much more usable. After a quick fresh install on the SSD, I rebooted and found the boot time is much quicker than before and the desktop is very snappy. It boots in around 15 seconds and shuts down in 4 seconds. Boot time with its original old hard drive was a lot longer! 

All i needed to do then was install all my favourite apps and tweak the desktop to my liking. Desktop apps like Chrome start quicker too. It's a night and day difference in performance! I am really glad I upgraded the Latitude to an SSD and I'd like to upgrade some of my other laptops too. The old hard drive will go on the spares pile. Adding an SSD really is a great way to bring these old laptops a new lease of life. Next in line for the SSD treatment might be my old white Macbook...

Further reading:

01/07/2020 - Resurrecting My Lenovo ThinkPad W500

Resurrecting My Lenovo ThinkPad W500

Just the other day, Google Photos reminded me that I have a ThinkPad that a friend of mine gave to me. At the time, it was lacking its original SSD so I put in an old HDD, installed KDE Neon, played with it a bit then put it to one side. So having been reminded of it, I thought I'd dig it out and have another play.

It's a ThinkPad W500, has a P9500 2.53Ghz Core 2 Duo CPU with 8GB of RAM and I put an 80GB hard drive in it. It has one hardware issue. It has Intel onboard graphics and a discrete ATI card, which seems to be dead. For some reason, after being sat for a few years, it then tried to use that as the default, but on boot, a black screen is all you get.

It's a known issue with these ThinkPads and to fix it, unplug from the mains, remove the battery, undo some screws underneath to get access to the top. Then disconnect the BIOS battery and leave for 20 minutes, and then reverse the process. Plug in, then press F1 at the boot logo to enter the BIOS. Go to Config > Display then set the primary video device to Internal.

I then updated KDE Neon and everything is working nicely. After logging in, KDE only uses about a Gig of RAM which is good for a full fat desktop system.

KDE Neon (User Edition) is my distro of choice these days, I have had it installed on my main desktop for a few years. It is based on K/Ubuntu LTS releases but with the latest KDE installed. 

I really like the amount of ports it has, quick release DVD drive, onboard Ethernet, PCMCIA, etc and the classic Thinkpad keyboard. 

That classic Thinkpad keyboard:

Easily removable DVD combo drive:

 
I am not sure how often I will use it, as my main laptop is a lightweight Chromebook, but it's nice to have a full Linux laptop handy occasionally. I do also have a Dell Latitude E6500 that's in better shape but my next job will be updating my old Sony VAIO to the latest Mint Linux.