[lqet]

For the display, I bought an LED conversion kit (mainly for the reduced power consumption) and have no complaints regarding the results. But if you are used to modern screens, the display may indeed appear a bit grainy. It doesn't bother me, though.

Regarding the problems with the chassis:

1) Yes, this is absolutely true. The used X61 I bought on eBay already had this issue in a very early stage. However, as the conversion kit does not come with a pccard slot, I just glued the slot latch shut and re-enforced it from the inside. The kit actually comes with a plastic part to close to ejector-button hole for the pccard slot, which is also designed to give additional support.

2) Hm, I will keep an eye on this, but so far I do not have any problems here. On previous ThinkPads I owned I found that any cracks in the chassis can be stopped from extending by opening the ThinkPad, adding a generous amount of superglue on the crack (from the inside) and immediately sprinkling fibers (with a 5mm length) on the glue. I usually obtain the fibers by cutting off a small part of some cheap hardware store synthetic cord.

It should also be added that I have a few spare parts from an X60 chassis (from which I obtained the original logo stickers). If you compare the X60 and the X61 chassis, you can definitely see that some additional reinforcements were added to the X61 chassis, so if anyone is planning to build an X62, I would recommend to use an X61 as a starting point. The X61 chassis also has some kind of a copper heat shield below the palm rests, which the X60 chassis has not.

[newnewpdro]

What are you doing for batteries? How's the battery life on your X62 in linux, and how many cells?

I did appreciate the improved battery life with the LED conversion, but my complaints are more along the lines of colors being off and a visible pattern of the LED strip at the bottom of the display. It's non-trivial to get the LED strip perfectly aligned in the CCFL gutter, and in my last attempt there were some other artifacts, it certainly didn't look OEM in terms of quality.

Having said that, the SXGA+ 4:3 screen in that dimension is a rather nice resolution. I just wish there were compatible OEM LED options to do the mod with. Unfortunately these days nobody seems to be producing 4:3 screens.

[lqet]

Yes, it took me some hours to adjust the LED strip to minimize the effect, but the LED artifacts s are still faintly recognizable in the bottom 5mm of the screen if I'm in a dark room and the screen is mainly white in this area. However, I usually use this laptop as my daily coding workhorse within a terminal with a dark background, where the effect is not present.

Regarding the battery, I use this one: https://www.laptopbatteryexpress.com/Lenovo-long-life-ThinkP...

Battery life is around 7-8 hours when I am coding with 100% screen brightness, using a basically vanilla Ubuntu 16.04. It was close to 9 hours when the battery was new.