My t490 in Fedora Gnome goes just fine. Similar load and launch speeds to the bloated win 11 Dell Latitudes we use at work with Core Ultra 7's. Something isn't right.

It shouldn't be that slow. Have you checked the temperature and clock speeds under load to make sure it's not thermal throttling?

I've just submitted an offer for a slew of T480/T490/T14 and some Elitebooks in a "B-class" state; busted screens, malfunctioning keyboards, etc, avg price is in the $30 range. no SSDs, chargers, and save for a coupla T14s with onboard RAM, they're usually without RAM. so once completed, they should be in the $100-$150 range.

I wouldn't dwell too much on the price, whether you can have it for $200 or $300 isn't really significant, it's not like you're doing this twice a year. whatever you get now will last you for many moons, so amortized over that period that's nothing to fret about. make sure the battery/ies are OK as finding a good aftermarket replacement's gonna hurt.

T14 is obv better than T480; yeah the latter's got two batteries, but the former sips way less power while packing more power; also Ryzen options (5000-series and later only). serviceability is similar, huge cross-model/generation parts-compatibility. soldered RAM used to be an issue, but with today's prices, having 16 GB on-board (+ one slot free) can be a welcome addition. def stay away from the X1; the heft difference is insignificant but it drastically limits the upgrades and repairs you can do on your own.

In the USA I paid $200 for a T14 Gen. 1 with 8 gigs of ram and 256gb SSD in 2023. About a year and a half later in early 2025 I got an i7 16gb ram 256gb T14 Gen. 3 for $250

What do you mean you’re only going to be using it for backup files? Like as a way to store your backups? An external hard drive will do that, or basically any old PC you can find in the dumps will work. If it’s just hosting backups it just needs enough power to turn on and host a network share.

I am in the US. A month ago, I paid $280 for a Gen 2 with 11th Gen i7, 16 gigs of RAM and 500 gigs of storage.

My T480 is showing its age and here in the US they are overpriced. X1 gen 9 can be found for a solid price on places like eBay but I do think T14 is generally the best value.

Yep, the issue is probably the battery, since it's so old and in horrible conditions

Have also had such strange issues with worn out batteries on my Thinkpads. If it's consistently fine on AC, could be that the weak battery is struggling to output enough power for everything to spin up at once.

I've purchased two Kingsener batteries and both have the same or greater capacity as the originals. They feel much more substantial than the cheaper no-name batteries. Only issues are that the one in my X230 is slightly loose and it doesn't play well with charge thresholds after installing coreboot, i.e. it falls out of calibration and randomly shuts off around 30% if I don't let it reach 100% every 2 weeks or so.

if having to plug it in before turning your laptop on is fine with you, then you could probably just leave it alone until the battery completely dies.

i say this because -- back in the 1990's -- changing the battery sometimes caused problems like this and you might be better off letting this sleeping dog lie given the age of your laptop.

That unfortunately didn't work

Yeah the battery is barely hanging on, i believe it's around 50-60%, i was about to replace it but i didn't know it could cause this. Removing the battery and turning it on on AC works fine. Are the kingsener fine?

Weird. I have a dell workstation that does the same thing, except the first time all the fans rev up to full speed before abruptly shutting off. Then the second, it shuts off really quick. Then the third, it works flawlessly. I think it happens more often when the comptuer is unplugged/disconnected from power quickly. So maybe it's something to do with shutting down? That's a wild guess based on my problem that I definitely don't care enough to troubleshoot.

it might be getting a charge with the ac and letting it boot up like normal -- i would try another battery in your shoes.

wait, it only exhibits this "3 boot" problem when its on battery? If you remove the battery and just attach it to the AC adapter does it boot on first button press every time?

Thanks for suggesting this, and yeah attaching it to the AC makes it turn on fine, probably a problem with the button

Have you reset the cmos to defaults after changing the battery? It's very rare, but they can act funky when the voltage droops, but doesn't dip enough for it to fully lose the contents.

Also is that machine new enough to have an SOC reset hole? try holding that for 30 seconds if so. That fixes all sorts of issues that makes 0 science to me.

maybe something physical with the power button? try setting the bios option to auto boot when ac adapter connects, and try booting that way