About six years ago I bought a used Lenovo ThinkPad X200 (machine type 7458) to use as a portable packet station and software defined radio (SDR) for amateur radio. It's been a great little performer, so much so that I started using it for other Windows-specific things as well, like interfacing with my Suunto dive computers, and running target analysis software (OnTarget). It's small and light-weight, making it easy to carry around in the field, and it has a decent battery life. I don't need much CPU power for any of this stuff, so the Centrino CPU performs just fine, and as was typical for ThinkPads manufactured back then the computer is pretty rugged.
However, it was originally running Windows 7, which is getting long in the tooth—Microsoft's mainstream support for Win7 ended in 2015, and extended support ends at the start of 2020. I upgraded it for free to Windows 10 Home when Microsoft was offering that option, but for the last few major releases of Win10 I couldn't successfully install the updates. I was stuck at release 1507, and no matter what I tried I could not upgrade successfully. So, cursing Microsoft, I "paid the Windows tax" by backing up all my data and re-installing Win10 from scratch. While I was at it I decided to replace the internal hard drive, a 160 GB Seagate Momentus 7200.4, with a 250 GB Samsung 860 EVO SSD to make the computer even more immune to shocks and to possibly get better battery life.
Of course, now that it's running the latest version of Win10 and it has a spiffy-fast SSD, the 4 GB of RAM seemed a bit low. Lenovo doesn't certify this particular X200 for anything more than that(1), but folks on the 'net have pointed out that the Intel chipset supports 8 GB. Folks have tried various brands of RAM, trying to get the computer to recognize 8 GB, with varying success. The key seems to be to avoid the high-density RAM kits. I found several folks were successful with a particular kit from Crucial, specifically the CT2KIT51264BF160B, so I ordered one and can confirm that it works just great.
So for $150 I was able to upgrade both the RAM and the hard drive, netting me at least a couple more years of service from this great little workhorse of a laptop.
(1) In fact, Lenovo doesn't seem to want to acknowledge that they ever even made this laptop since they don't even show any driver updates or documentation downloads are available when you search by machine type on their website. Note that you can use your favorite search engine, though, and usually dig up the BIOS update files, which is the only hardware update file you really need from Lenovo—the rest of the X200's hardware seems to be supported just fine by the drivers bundled with Win10.
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