It was remarkably easy to upgrade the x220. The battery is external, and you just undo a latch. The disk you swap out by undoing one screw and sliding out the disk. But all-in-all, the E14 is a significant upgrade and I’ll be keeping it, and not going back to the x220. I might consider taking it on the train if I get paranoid of dropping the shiny new E14.
| Item | Cost with tax and shipping |
| New battery (9 cell, aftermarket, 73 Wh) | $24 |
| SSD (WD SATA3 250 GB) | $42 |
| RAM 16GB | Held off ~$20 |
| $66 |
The old disk was a 7200 rpm disk, so no slouch, and I don’t know that there is a huge difference with the SSD, but I think bootups and wakes from sleep are a bit faster. What I am impressed about, having not bothered to measure this before, is the sleep mode power consumption. This old beater from 2012 consumes 0.4W during sleep: 5x less than the E14. This is the kind of low power state I’m used to from macs. I hope I can fiddle around and get the E14 to this state.
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