mlfh

Personally I'd do the following:

• boot into the bios config menu to make sure it's unlocked (if it's locked and they don't have the password that'd be a dealbreaker for me)
• boot into a live linux environment from usb and test both batteries, keyboard, trackpoint/trackpad, speakers, microphone, wifi, and all external ports (T480 has 2 usb-c, 2 usb-a, ethernet, hdmi, headset, and sd - make sure batteries charge well from both usb-c ports)
• to check the storage health, install nvme-cli if not installed, run nvme smart-log /dev/nvme0 and check the "percentage_used" value: if it's near 100% it might die and need replacement soon
• to check that the vents, airflow, and cooling hardware are in good shape, install stress if not installed, run stress -c 7 to load up 7 of the 8 available cpu threads, make sure the fan spins up good and strong, and watch /sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone0/temp to make sure the cpu temperature stays under ~90-95 degrees

On my own time later, I'd run memtest86+ overnight from bootable usb to check the memory, then install tlp and run tlp recalibrate with the laptop on the charger to recalibrate the batteries

Edit: enjoy the new laptop! I hope it works great for you

Just part of our standard office package, everyone gets a laptop, dock, and external monitors for their workspace.

I can't speak for all of them, but we've had a couple hundred deployed over the last several years with very few issues. Mine's been solid as a rock.

The usb-c docks, however, are a nightmare, though I gather that's fairly universal.

I daily a T480 with Debian for work, and I'd recommend it highly. Great performance, battery, build quality, look & feel, etc. We have some 7480s deployed and while they've been solid as well, I much prefer the thinkpad. T series will have better performance and battery than X series, also, so I'd take the T480 over the X1C.

I was sad to learn Parmesan isn't vegetarian :(

https://grapheneos.org/faq#device-lifetime

You can buy a used Pixel 8 and it will be supported by Graphene through 2030 at the very earliest, probably the best support lifecycle you can possibly get on a phone.

Ctrl+r was a life-changer when I first learned it.

There should be a section in the configuration about dhcp, which is how ipv4 addresses are given out on your network. What happens is when a device first connects to the network, it sends out a broadcast with its mac address - the dhcp server (in this case, your router/firewall) hears this, and sends back a reply allocating an address. You should be able to see a list of currently allocated addresses, and hopefully configure reservations to make those allocations permanent. To reserve an ipv4 address for a specific device, you need that device's mac address.

Each item on that current allocations list should have a hostname, a mac address, and an ipv4 address. If it's not clear by the hostname which device is the tv, you can look up each mac address and deduce from there (the first part of each address is unique to a specific manufacturer).

Once you have an ipv4 address reserved for the tv, you can set your outbound firewall rule to block it.

Ipv6, as I mentioned, is much more complicated. It might be possible to disable it completely on your router, and that's likely the only way to block the tv from using it, but then your whole network will lose ipv6 capability across that boundary (probably not a lot of downside to that, though).

Good luck!

If your firewall can set outbound rules, and you can control DHCP on your network so that you can reliably know the TV's IPv4 address, you can block the TV from reaching beyond the local network there with a "deny all from source address of TV" type rule.

If your router/firewall is handling IPv6 though, it gets a lot more complicated, since the TV could have any number of addresses that change often.

When it comes to privacy and security, I think you should treat all cloud providers equally. Use a client with client-side encryption so that the only thing that touches the provider is encrypted data.

Rclone is an example of a good client that can do this, and can even mount your cloud storage as a filesystem with its encryption layer in between.

I'd recommend a full battery calibration before running the command one more time, if you haven't already (charge the battery fully, leave it on the charger at 100% for a while, then fully discharge until it shuts itself off, leave it for a bit, then fully recharge while off). If the calibrated values line up with a full:design ratio of ~80%, especially with a 10-year-old battery with almost 700 cycles on it, my take is that's pretty great.

That said, I think the best way to get an accurate feel for the health of an old battery is to put it through one full cycle of normal use and time how long it takes to die.

If you're genuinely worried about this, you shouldn't be using untrusted machines for remote access.