Hot on the heels of a touchpad swap in my “new” Thinkpad T440P, come the next two upgrades: backlit keyboard and an IPS display. I shall call this machine Frankenpad as it’s rapidly deviating from the original configuration (20AWS series).
I finally decided to replace my 6 years old Thinkpad X200 with a bit more modern used T440P. More power, better battery life and all the other modern goodies were all things I was looking forward to. Unfortunately I also knew that for the 44x series Lenovo changed the design of the trackpad to a single piece clickable square. No more beloved buttons, so easy to use with the trackpoint. Not a big deal- plenty of people reported using the newer design of the trackpad off a T45x series to get those buttons back, so I figured i’ll just swap it in. The laptop came in, and I tried really hard to like the trackpad as is. No go: total lack of feel, constantly pressing RMB instead of LMB and a very annoying clicking sound heard in the whole house. It had to go!
Don’t mess with success, Lenovo!
This is an old repair I did a while ago and posted on thinkpads forums. Reposting here to put it all under one roof. We have quite a few IBM Thinkpads X31 in the family. They are built like a tank and work well enough to keep using them despite 2003-2004 datecodes. One day two of them started exhibiting identical symptoms- they would just refuse to turn on. No lights, fans or other signs of life. Luckily I stumbled on a schematic on the web, so that was a good starting point.