Chrisoft

Breaking news: I did something horrible to my ThinkPad X1 Yoga once again (shocker…)!

If you want to play catch-up, here are the previous episodes: The initial review, and The first screen replacement. Note that both posts are ancient and in Chinese.

If you just want a quick recap, or in case you couldn’t read Chinese:

• The laptop in question is a ThinkPad X1 Yoga first gen purchased in the US in early 2016, and delivered into my hands mid 2016.
• It was completely maxed out in the specs department, except the screen and WWAN. The WWAN and OLED screen options were unavailable at the time of purchase.
• Roughly half a year into its lifetime, I broke the screen digitizer through a deliberate and evil act: attempting to replace the factory anti-glare coating with a tempered glass protector. The screen glass cracked in the process, completely disabling all functionality of the digitizer layer. I spent the equivalent of $150 purchasing a replacement LCD assembly and installed it myself, because the authorized service provider quoted me more than $500 for a repair. I failed to properly close the clips on one side of the LCD assembly. So I had to give in and ask for a repair from a Lenovo authorized service provider. But unfortunately they don’t know how to properly install the LCD assembly either, leaving the screen flapping around in the breeze for many years.
• In its second year of service, I accidentally spilled half a glass of hot (!!) water into the keyboard. As pretty much all ThinkPads are, this machine is designed to be spill-proof. So I did not pay too much attention to it once I’ve let most of the water out through the drainage holes. However, roughly three months after the incident, the fingerprint reader on the machine decided to quit. There were a few corrosion marks near the fingerprint reader connector on the motherboard. However later through some basic probing, it was determined that the actual cause is a broken flex cable.

What is it about this time?

Well, blame this reddit post.

I randomly decided to look up a few reviews of the OLED version of this laptop one day, and I came across that post. Someone upgraded [1] their LCD X1 Yoga to an OLED display. It’s really a fascinating idea, isn’t it? After looking up the price to source the required parts (prior to all the tariff insanity), I found out that the upgrade is actually very affordable in 2025. So not only did I commit myself to the upgrade, I decided to perform a total exterior refurbishment as well: my battle-scarred X1 yoga has definitely seen better days, and it deserves better.

Here is a list of parts that I ordered:

PART                                      SOURCE           PRICE
OLED display assembly 01AW977         aliexpress          $66.20
OLED driver board 00NY439             aliexpress          $28.13
Lenovo Wacom Active Pen 00HN897       aliexpress          $20.55
Sensor & Camera Module Cable 01AW980  aliexpress          $ 9.67
Fingerprint Module 01AX699            aliexpress          $12.58
OLED Screen Cable 01AW979             aliexpress          $15.88
Base Cover 01AW995                    aliexpress          $39.91
OLED Rear Cover 01AW978               aliexpress          $39.06
Palmrest Cover 00JT863                ebay                $26.99
Keyboard 00JT864                      ebay                $50.34
LCD Misc Kit 01AW987                  Lenovo              $38.57
Base Misc Kit 01AW964                 Lenovo              $66.98
----------------------------------------------------------------
Grand Total                                              $414.86

The part number of the fingerprint module I ordered wasn’t for the X1 Yoga, but instead for the T470, which uses a physically compatible sensor with USB ID 138a:0097 instead of 138a:0090 found on the X1 Yoga. The newer module seems to have match-on-chip as its only operation mode, which provides better security (in theory).[2]

“LCD Misc Kit” provides the missing rubber plug over the screen screw. “Base Misc Kit” provides replacement for the broken fingerprint reader cable, as well as the degraded rubber on what Lenovo calls the “rising rubber foot”. These parts are incredibly difficult to source, and the only reliable provider I could find is Lenovo itself, which sells them at completely delusional prices. But alas, to carry out the perfect refurbishment, I had to pay the ransom.[3] It’s also notable that the price of the OLED panel itself is incredibly low these days[4].

As always I fell victim to the much dreaded scope creep: If I have to swap the rear cover for the OLED screen anyway[5], why don’t I swap the base and palm rest cover too? Why not the keyboard as well? Why should I live with degraded rubber parts once all of this has been swapped? Am I some kind of monster that doesn’t get things all the way done? Just like this, I spent more than $400 before I could notice it, while my original budget for the job was <$200. That amount of money will probably get me 4 of these machines in the used market, but the upside is that mine will effectively look brand new after the swap.

Installing the parts

The installation wasn’t super complicated. The palm rest cover arrived one day late, so I decided to be done with the display assembly first.

I haven’t disassembled the machine to this extent for years. There were parts of the machine that were absolutely filthy. There were quite a few pretty bad looking corrosion marks under the camera / sensor hub flex cable. Both the connector and the cable are in a horrific state. I was actually amazed that the machine was able to power on at all in that state. I cleaned up the corrosion with rubbing alcohol and proceeded with the modding.

There was a small issue with the official hardware maintenance manual – it has no mention of the OLED model at all. It does not mention the special parts used in the OLED version, nor does it contain instructions on how to install them. But ultimately it’s not super complicated: the OLED driver board would go under a small plastic clip under the rear cover, then two small plastic protrusion would hold the board in place through two holes on the board. These anchor points for the OLED driver board are the only differences between the OLED rear cover and the LCD rear cover, as far as I can tell. There are no fasteners involved. Cabling for the OLED panel is quite different from the LCD panel, but connecting them up is mostly just a matter of “adult LEGO”.

The other thing that costed me some significant amount of time was transferring the antennae for WiFi and WWAN. I have almost forgotten that I still have the WWAN antennae dangling in the base of the machine. Improper antennae installation was the reason why I wasn’t able to close the rear cover in my last screen repairing attempt, so I tried to be extra careful this time. Unfortunately I still messed up: I partially tore the copper tab on one of the WiFi antennae. Since I don’t really have a proper fix for it, I simply glued the thing back together. I did not bother to shove all the antenna cables into cable channels on the rear cover, because last time I spent an unholy amount of time on it and still failed – I just taped the cables down using some Kapton tape. I was ultimately able to make the rear cover fit this time – still not perfectly, but much better than the display panel falling off at any time. And as a bonus, WiFi reception wasn’t meaningfully impacted after this whole ordeal. Yay!

I turned the computer on for the first time with the new screen. Nothing exploded. The Lenovo logo showed up on the screen and I was immediately stunned – the colors were absolutely poppin’ on this panel. In fact, it may even feel like a bit over saturated on the default settings. There was another thing that was immediately apparent: screen brightness control no longer worked. The screen is stuck at highest brightness. I was kind of expecting this because I have read before that OLED screen brightness control on Linux is janky. So I tried a bunch of fixes that were found on various places[6], including setting i915.enable_dpcd_backlight to all possible values, and none of them worked. So I had to set a software “brightness” by using something like xrandr --output eDP-1 --brightness 0.5. This however, is not a valid long-term solution, because it effectively reduces the available color depth of the display, and will cause visible banding on low settings (comparison shown below). So I’ll have to find a proper solution.

The panel identified itself as “ATNA40JU01-0” in its EDID, which seems to be the correct model number from Samsung. One pretty big annoyance that I was able to notice pretty soon after the installation was that the screen sometimes has a green-ish horizontal bar flash across it when it turns off.

I switched to a pitch black color scheme for my desktop environment, and reduced the amount of completely static elements on screen, with the hope to reduce OLED burn-in. The editor theme I’m using however, does not have a pitch black text background. And while I was writing some code later that night, I realized that there’s a vertical band in the dead middle of the panel that is very slightly brighter compared to the rest of the screen. This happened when I was on a software brightness of 25%, so realistically this would only be (very subtly) visible when the color displayed is extremely dark while not being pitch black, and the text editor background shouldn’t cause any visual disturbance once I have proper PWM brightness control working[7].

The palm rest cover arrived on the following day, and I transferred the entire machine into the new base shell. All I can say is that the process was surprisingly short. At this point, my X1 Yoga was fully refurbished, with nearly all user-facing components replaced. The only exceptions are the touchpad (which I don’t use anyway), and the hinges (which still work perfectly after some cleaning).

Apologies for not having any photos of the actual refurbishment process. I got too excited to take any pictures.

Consequence of the first failed screen repair. Photo taken 2017-01-09.	(Slightly NSFW) The battle-scarred laptop.
Parts and things.	Corrosion on the camera / sensor board connector.
NSFW: Filthy screen, filthy hinge, filthy everything.	NSFW: The other filthy hinge, and corroded connector.
First power up!
The husk.	And the brand new laptop.
“The Peel” (video)

A super-long-term review

In a few days, it’s going to be nine years since I’ve owned this machine. It’s probably just in time for a super long-term review from me.

Durability

As you are probably already aware at this point, I don’t exactly treat my machines with exceeding care, and my laptops usually have a pretty rough life (and look like absolute sh*t after a few years of use) for that reason. But this computer somehow managed to survive all of my nonsense over all these years: botched screen repairs, hot water in chassis, countless instances of rough handling. Even though the exterior was all scratched up, the core functionality of all the internals stayed rock solid.

Below is a list of functionalities that has degraded in an unusual manner over the years (unsurprisingly, it’s all my fault):

• Pen drift. There was a small area (roughly the size of an ordinary oreo cookie) on the display where pen hover does not work properly. When the pen is hovered above that area, the position reported by the digitizer would jump all over the place, performing clicks at random. Presumably this is because of the uneven screen surface caused by the botched screen repairs.
• The left shift key on the keyboard cracked. Although the key hasn’t completely split in half, the crack was very easily visible with the keyboard backlight turned on.
• The flex cable that connects the fingerprint scanner to the motherboard had a broken trace. The broken trace was in fact on pin 1, which is the positive power supply.
• There were a few “blobs” on the LCD near the center where the backlight appears quite a bit brighter than their surrounding areas. They don’t show up very well on camera, but are very visible to human eyes. Probably has the same root cause as the next point.
• There were bubbles forming below the coating of the base cover roughly 3 years into its life, which coincides with the time when I started regularly packing it with a giant steel box (the EDIROL SD-80) in my backpack. They all went burst later and peeled off from the cover, exposing the magnesium alloy. There were similar things happening to the palmreset side of the base, except that there were no bubbles. Those started as small dents, and later “grew” larger.
• The CMOS was completely dead some time in 2022. Whenever the main battery runs out, the system immediately loses its RTC time and all BIOS settings. I ordered a replacement (together with two main batteries for the machine. Yes, two.) from Lenovo to get the issue fixed.

Performance

Did it hold up? No, of course not. It’s a Skylake ULV dual core, what would you expect? And you’d be a little bit crazy if you disagree (unless you’re a true terminal dweller – in that case, you might as well stick with a Core 2 Duo).

With the highly bloated modern web, this machine frequently chugs in Chromium. Yes I know, I use Chromium. Shame on me. But I do use Firefox too, and it does hold up slightly better on this machine, but not by a lot.

I’ve noticed the graphics power in the feeble Intel HD 520 not keeping up with what I do in 2019, when I realized that it could barely run Minecraft in 1080p at 60 FPS. In fact, I never relied on this machine for any intensive graphics work. I used the abomination that was the mobile Sandy Bridge quad core slapped on a Supermicro motherboard with a 2080 FE for that purpose until I got my current workstation.

In terms of pure CPU performance, this machine now takes about an hour to build stage2 rustc together with the standard library. This is quite unacceptable because my current day job involves frequent rustc builds (although it’s stage0 only). In comparison, it takes my Framework 13 (i7-1185G7) ~20 minutes to build the stage2. The non-upgradable 16 GiB of RAM has also become a problem, when rust-analyzer will happily use half of it with a large project loaded. Not to mention that Skylake was among the most impacted micro-architectures by mitigation for various CPU vulnerabilities such as Spectre and Meltdown.

But of course it still handles simple tasks just fine. This machine is still being used every day for the following things:

• E-mail and other general communications.
• Word processing. Only real word processing though, e.g. LaTeX.
• Web development. Since I’m not using any fancy new tech for my website, everything that you saw on this website was typed out on this almost decade-old laptop, including this post.
• Development of my personal projects, most of them. My personal projects are all on the smaller side, and as long as they don’t require any specialized hardware, this platform can still handle it.

Battery life is still surprisingly good. I swapped the main battery once in 2022[8], and right now the battery holds ~92% of its designed capacity. I haven’t measured the actual run time after the panel swap, but before it can still regularly last for more than 10 hours of light, continuous usage, thanks to the stripped down nature of my setup. Since the OLED panel does consume more power, it remains to be seen how long the battery would last with this new screen.

Other criticisms

(… that was absent from my original review)

The speakers are abysmal and to be honest, an embarrassment. Apparently Lenovo thought business machine owners must live with speakers of such garbage quality.

No thunderbolt or even USB Type-C. Not seen as a big deal by me back then, when USB Type-C was still quite new. However this has become a more and more prevalent issue over the years. If I want to use my external SSD, which only has a Type-C connector, with both my ThinkPad and my Framework, I’d have to bring two different cables.[9]

Poor software integration on the Linux side, even after almost ten years. I will not comment on tablet mode support, because I haven’t been running a full desktop environment for more than five years, and the kernel interface has been present for years now, which is more than enough for me. And the touch screen experience on Linux has been “meh” all along[10], but I’m not here to bitch about that either. It’s the fingerprint reader still not receiving proper support after all this time that baffles me. There are a bunch of third-party forks and standalone projects, all barely working (or not working at all)[11]. And apparently due to some dev drama there’s practically no hope that these reverse engineered drivers can be upstreamed to libfprint. Now, I know the problems with reverse engineered drivers. But not coming up with a satisfying solution for a problem that impacts so many users (keep in mind that the ever so popular T480 series uses a very similar sensor) in nearly a decade seems a little bit too much. And yes, fingerprint is not a secure method for user authentication, and I will not enable it even if proper upstream support is present (see my Framework laptop). But for people who do use it, this has become an unnecessary obstacle.

Other non-criticisms

As noted in my original post, soon after my initial purchase, I added the WWAN option to my machine myself. It worked well under Windows, but I didn’t figure out a way to use it under Linux back then. Later I found this project, which not only allowed me to connect to the Internet via WWAN, but see all the connection details that Windows hides from the user and manage SMS text messages as well. Ironically in later versions of Windows 10, Microsoft removed the ability to send (and later receive) SMS messages using the WWAN adapter from the built-in messaging app, which made Linux my only way to manage these messages.

I upgraded the built-in wifi adapter from the Intel 8260 to the AX200 in early 2021. There is no wifi whitelist in the BIOS for this machine, so the upgrade was as simple as removing the old card and dropping the card in.

I replaced the thermal paste with a phase-change sheet in 2023, at the same time when I replaced the thermal paste in my Framework. I got a similar improvement on the thermal performance. Single-threaded loads would no longer cause the temperature to shoot up beyond 70 degrees, and fully-loaded thermals also improved by ~5 degrees (from 85 degrees to 79 degrees).

I swapped the trackpoint rubber dome a bunch of times. Not very surprising because it’s a consumable that is subjected to regular wear and tear. One notable thing was that in my original post, I stated that I did not like these low-profile trackpoints. But once I have become used to it, it works just as well as the older iterations. The sensitivity issue only requires a simple tweak of the numbers (in /sys/devices/platform/i8042/serio1/serio2/speed and /sys/devices/platform/i8042/serio1/serio2/sensitivity).

Comparison against my Framework 13

I’ve spent nearly 4 years with my original Framework 13 at the time of this writing, and I can confidently say that it has given me a lot more grief over its lifespan. From the 0.4 GHz CPU (the BDPROCHOT issue), system instability and USB port interference, bad touchpad, and flawed RTC battery design, to the fried USB port (okay this one is probably my fault). My experience with this computer is certainly much less trouble-free compared to that with my X1 Yoga (as long as I’m not the one causing the problem). Most of the problems mentioned above have later been resolved, but it’s still notable that I never had to deal with such issues on my X1 Yoga.

Just a few days ago, my Framework decided to publicly humiliate me. Its fan randomly decided to start making noise akin to a dying spinning rust hard drive, only 10x louder, in the midst of a meeting. I had to shut off the computer because of the sheer embarrassment it cause me.

Framework forum user gringrind put it in the perfect way in the following post: FW13 Fan Noise (Scraping/rattling):

I like having a laptop that I can repair, I don’t want a laptop that I have to repair twice a year.

This post is quite alarming, because according to the discussion there it seems that their newer thermal solutions still suffer from a similar issue. I am certainly aware that Framework is a pretty new company. And their radical new approach of designing a repairable laptop in this weight class certainly put them into a disadvantaged position compared to more established vendors. And to be clear: I do support their design philosophy (and how they operate[12]) in general. But if they are repeating the same mistakes on their newer products, it will be perceived as a pattern and become less forgivable over time. I hope they can get the Strix Point generation Framework 13 right.

They do have much better customer service than Lenovo though, speaking from my personal experience. I have, however, seen different opinions on this matter too… So don’t let my experience speak for you.

To conclude this section: my Framework 13 quickly assumed the position of being my “work” laptop since I got it, leaving my personal computing tasks to the X1 Yoga. This role assignment does seem fit for both machines, and I have no intention of changing it any time soon.

Conclusion

It would not be an exaggeration if I say this is still that laptop that brought me the least trouble and the most joy. Yes, I did not win the silicon lottery and my unit doesn’t undervolt as well as other people’s units. Yes, there are features of this machine that I’ve never made working with my software setup. Yes, it is not as capable as it was back in the day. But people are still rocking their X201 and T420 in 2025. There’s no reason why my X1 Yoga, now a Frankenstein’s monster with an all-new exterior, can’t serve me for yet another decade.

What’s next?

• Reverse engineer the OLED Panel driver for Windows.
• Treat the machine with slightly more respect and don’t scratch it up within a year.
• Flash the EEPROM in my X60 Tablet so that it can finally hit 60Hz refresh rate?
• Not buying any new machines from Lenovo before they stop f*cking around with the keyboard design and most importantly, start offering a keyboard option without the stupid copilot key.