Recently, the Wi-Fi in my ThinkPad x220 became highly unreliable. It almost never worked, especially when out of the house. I actually managed with it like this for a few weeks, since I make a habit of keeping most of the files and programs I need to do work on my computer locally. However, today I decided enough was enough.
The original Wi-Fi chip that came with the laptop was a RealTek product; these generally do not have open-source drivers, which proved problematic when I wanted to try running FreeBSD on it, since that operating system only has open-source drivers by default. I did a little research, and found the Intel Centrino Ultimate-N 6300, which has open-source drivers (very cool Intel), as well as 5GHz Wi-Fi; I expect that to be especially useful since a new building on my university campus (which has many rooms that students can book for meetings) only seems to have 5GHz wireless access points. I found the chip unreliable at the time, and didn’t stick with FreeBSD, so I ended up going back to the RealTek chip.
However, now that that one is almost completely broken, the Intel one would be a better option even if it was as unreliable as I remembered it, and I’ve not encountered any issues after a few hours of using it. The replacement was very simple, taking only about 15 minutes at a casual pace (although I have taken the laptop apart many times before).
For many weeks I’d been consoling myself with the prospect of receiving a company laptop at my internship this summer, but once again the ThinkPad has proven the value of easy repairability.