Maybe the majority of people don't treat their laptops like they were a solid brick of cast iron (Like me).
Yep, refurbished by a reputable seller. It came with no noticeable scratches, cracks, light spots, dead pixels or anything and just about 90% of the designed capacity on the battery. Switched the HDD (7mm height) with an SSD (which are all 7mm, to my knowledge), got a knock-off caddy for cheap and put in the original HDD. The ultrabay caddy can fit a drive of up to 9,5mm, so you have a bit more choice there. The only drawback as I see it, is that you cannot put in a larger battery in it, as it is mounted at the bottom and not in the back like the standard series. The few extra USB ports missing is no big deal to me.
Come to think of yesterday I had a discussion with my house mate (the one you helped with the wireshark capture, actually) about what the different computers in the house were. We agreed our Lenovos were like elite soldiers, though I guess any elite soldier has to have their private princess time ;)
And here goes the hunt for where to buy it.. Thanks!
Ruggedness is good to have, but better to not need it ;)
Your welcome... its extremely spacious and the laptop compartment is like a plastic tank =) and you can put so much stuff into it... be careful to not overload your spine... it will snap before the shoulder straps do ;-)
I have the thinkpad p50 best laptop i've ever owned, i've loved thinkpads since i started in the IT field a few years ago but could never buy one as powerful as this until now :-)
Processor Intel Core i7-6820HQ Processor (8MB Cache, up to 3.60GHz) Operating System Windows 10 Pro currently but will be switching to arch very soon Display Type 15.6" UHD 4k, anti-glare, IPS Memory 8GB DDR4-2133 SODIMM Graphics NVIDIA Quadro M2000M 4GB Hard Drive M.2 256GB SSD Battery 6 Cell Li-Polymer Battery Wireless Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 8260, 2x2, Wi-Fi with Bluetooth 4.0 Mini Displayport 1.2 Thunderbolt 3
For what I need to do the i7-5600U @ 2.6GHz is plenty.. and 12GB (11,5GB for the OS, 0.5 for the IGPU) ram (fuckers only giving me one DIMM slot) .. and a swap to 512GB SSD ... I am plenty happy.
the Sceen could have had a higher resolution... but FHD is ok... would like UHD though... but one gotta make compromises it seems.
I could have 2 M.2 as well, but I had to have that pesky smartcard slot and I have the WWAN module, so the two slots besides the one for WLAN+Bluetooth are occupied (WWAN) or not built in (becaus of the smartcardt)... so I am left with SATA3... but tbh. I do not manage to fill the 512GB so... I am not worried. And Samsung 850 pro is plenty fast.
But linux support usually is very good for Thinkpads; only piece of concern with your p50 would be the switchable graphics, as bumblebee/optimus can be still quite flaky in Linux.
The last machine I had with that was the T440p and it worked... uhm... not very reliably untill halve a year of it beeing released first as the OSS guys had to catch up with Nvidia changing some stuff on the PCI bus and registers that caused the system to kernel panic when it detected the Nvidia gpu, so I had to actually blacklist it for halve a year =(
Though if your curious I would give it a shot; slap the linux of your choice (mine would be Ubuntu Gnome) onto a usb 3.0 thumbdrive and try it out.
I am curious what you think about the layout of the keyboard/trackpad. The Fn key being where ctrl should be kind of pushes me away. Additionally the offset trackpad doesn't seem like the best idea.
I'm actually thinking about getting a P50 for myself and those two things kind of worry me.
Also when you get it on arch, I'd love to know how the displayport out works via the Quadro. The 970m with 3 different versions of the linux drivers has NOT been that great, so I've had to revert to the intel graphics on my current laptop. Video tears on it pretty badly, on both the built in display and 4k external displays using the intel graphics, so I'd love to hear some first hand experiences if you'd be willing to share. All that with i3 window manager, so it's not like unity or gnome is my culprit.
I've always been a fan of the Thinkpads, my first laptop was a 600e. I always like the trackpoint way more than the touchpad, I found I could be a lot more accurate with it. Shame about the spyware stuff that Lenovo started doing.