cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/29217325

I've got a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon 10th generation, which, from the start, IIRC was criticized for not having the best battery life, I think, because of its processor (12th Gen Intel Core i7-1280P × 14).

I thought I had read that using a more recent kernel might help the lowish battery life problem (I'm using 6.11.0-24-generic at the moment), but it doesn't seem to help much, if at all.

I tried using tlp, which meant uninstalling power-profiles-daemon, but this just made my laptop run hot, and also screwed up my battery when I tried to set charging thresholds (had to reset it by using the emergency pin hole), so I probably won't be trying that again. Reinstalled power-profiles-daemon, and now have it on power saver; so back to normal now, not running hot, but battery life still isn't great.

Anything else I could try? There's auto-cpufreq which I used for a while on an older laptop,

Hey, I'm having trouble locating a resource to order replacement mouse click caps on my T490.

I replaced my keyboard and accidentally broke the clip on the left click and unfortunately the old keyboard is a slightly different design and thus also does not work.

The combination of key words only have been pulling up replacement keyboards and nipple caps.

I know this a Thinkpad community but I just found out what a Thinkcentre and Thinkstation are and they look interesting. A Thinkcentre M920q, for example, looks like a good home server candidate and used versions are very cheap on eBay.

My beloved T420's bezels are coming apart at the hinge. This has already happened once---I glued the plastic back together---but now is a very inconvenient time for it to happen again. So I'm thinking of upgrading.

For me, the most important factors are:

1. Portability - I have to carry my laptop with me on a nearly daily basis.
2. Linux support.
3. A good keyboard, preferably without the numpad.
4. An HDMI port.
5. Good battery life (~5 hours with active use should be plenty but more is welcome).

I'm thinking of going with the 8th generation X1 carbon but I'd like to hear your opinion.

Hi, after dropping my thinkpad, the battery got slightly messed up. I have to move a battery pin to have it fit in the slot, the battery charging status is often not read by Linux, and sometimes power won't be received even without the battery. I'm hoping the solution would just be figuring out how to remove the pin stuck in the motherboard slot (attempts so far have evaded me) and getting a new battery, but what does it look like to you? Thanks!

This is an aggressive method for when isopropyl alcohol on a towel is too slow or requires too much elbow grease. See the caveats section!

Materials

• Isopropyl alcohol, 100 mL or more
• Copper or copper-coated scourer
• Heavy-duty scrubbing pad (like the green piece on top of dish sponges)
• Magic eraser (replace with non-scratch scrubbing pad if not available)
• Paper towels
• A couple of hours

PPE

• Adequate ventilation
• Dust mask (microplastics)
• Sturdy, waterproof gloves, or in my case, non-waterproof fiberglass gloves over thin foodservice gloves
• Old clothes (stains)

Method

Remove power, batteries, and any electronic components you can.

This is an iterative process, so not every step has to be done perfectly in one pass.

Magnesium parts (usually the lower chassis and lid)

• The rubber coating is bound more strongly here than on plastic parts.
• Wet an area about 5 cm in diameter with isopropyl alcohol. There should be a shallow puddle of it where you will

I bought a ThinkPad T440p with Libreboot and SeaBIOS installed. I'm planning to upgrade the CPU to an Intel Core i7-4910MQ, but before purchasing, I wanted to double-check if there would be any compatibility issues with Libreboot and whether the computer would recognize the new CPU.

Recently i got an T14 g5 amd with the 8840u cpu. The laptop itself is really nice overall. But this thing does have coilwine, even on powersave mode. Cpu and gpu wise, the T14 g5 intel 155H should be kinda similar. Does someone has this laptop and can tell if this one has a problem with coil wine?

My T480 runs hot and sometimes the fan is really loud. Occasionally upon boot it'll give me "fan error." Tried reapplying the thermal paste but that didn't help much. It's got plenty of storage, ram, and an i7 processor, so it's not for lack of power that it's doing this.

At this point I'm thinking of investing in a fan/heatsink upgrade, but what do y'all recommend I upgrade the fan/heatsink to?

Has anybody else expierenced the same issue?

Basically, a collection of notes on building and running libreboot on t480. Hope it helps sb avoid a few pitfalls I've personally encountered. Corrections/other ways to do stuff are welcome.

1. If you're building libreboot from source like I did, you may want to replace repo URLs with mirrors in config/git/grub, as gnu repos are slow AF;
2. To boot your system, you'll need it to either be bootable via legacy bios (libreboot uses seabios by default), or, more realistically, have grub bootloader. On NixOS, I've changed the bootloader config to:

 (nix)

    
boot.loader.grub = {                          
  enable = true;                  
  device = "nodev"; # generate grub.cfg without installing grub itself  
  theme = lib.mkForce null;       
  font = lib.mkForce null;        
  splashImage = lib.mkForce null; 
};                                


  

Notice the disabled theming/fonts/background image: in my case, libreboot's grub would only show the blank screen 'til I disabled them, so

im looking into replacing my current x230 and framework laptop with an old thinkpad.

my requirements are: great linux support, compact (as much it can), alum or metallic body.

good to have: boxy look, model after 2018, coreboot/libreboot (i doubt new models are supported but one can dream)

does this thing exists?

Building Coreboot

• Significantly easier and lower risk than I expected. A lot is already taken care of once the mainboard is selected. There are many safety and sanity checks in the build process.
• Make sure to select "General Setup">"Option backend to use">"Use CMOS for configuration values" so that nvramcui and nvramtool works.
• Even if flashing only the top chip, build for the entire 12 MB ROM. Otherwise, the machine won't have the correct offset for the MRC cache and will cold boot when it should be resuming from suspend.

Installing Coreboot

• I am not yet confident enough to use an external programmer with my 3612QE board, so I opted for the 1vyrain route.
• Extracted the top 4MB of coreboot.rom using dd and once booted in the 1vyrain installer, overwrote /root/bios/X230.rom (double-check this for yourself, just going off my memory here) and let it flash the chip. This workaround to avoid having to upload my bios somewhere and connect 1vyrain to the internet.
• Aft

So, I'm making this post because I'm currently torn between 3 options:

• Upgrade my current T450 with 16GB of DDR3 and a 256GB (or maybe 512GB) NVME which has an i5-5300u and 1080p display
• Get a T14(s) G1 with an AMD CPU (for about 400 euros or so)
• Save up for a long time to buy a Framework laptop

The role of the laptop would be to do some software dev tasks and some light gaming (think ULTRAKILL, Minecraft and KSP, so really not anything that can't run on a good enough iGPU). Battery isn't much of a priority, since I'll use it plugged in most of the time, but it is preferred for when I do need it, nevertheless I don't wish to sacrifice CPU performance for it like what my T450 does when it crawls to 800MHz to extend its battery life from 4 hours to 5 hours (it has a dual 3-cell setup, both batteries at about 75% health). While I can save up a lot for a Framework or even a T14 Gen 5/6, I'd rather not because I just don't find it worth it for the price, and because It'd wear down

That is, turned on its side so the display is vertical, using an external keyboard. I'm thinking of getting one of the Yoga models, which are naturally suited to that. I run primarily browsers, emacs, and maybe calibre, under Debian GNU/Linux. My questions:

1. Any issues getting the X server to work that way?
2. Any issues with cables having to stick out of the edges and poke things? At minimum a power cable, but i like to use Ethernet instead of WiFi when I can.

Thanks!

I found this in near immaculate shape, for $2 at a Goodwill.

I'm trying to figure out what "era" (for lack of a better word) that this ThinkPad bag belongs to.

I'm maybe more specifically trying to find out if it's an appropriate match for my A30p.

Just got it today so I haven't had much time to play with it yet. But feel free to ask me anything about it and I'll answer when I can. The model I got has the non-touch 100% sRGB 400 nits display.

Yesterday this usb port works as usual, but today I turned on the notebook and just nothing. I tried to connect usb stick, phone, but nothing. lsusb can's see it. What can I do, what can I check?

So, I think we all know how when companies upgrade they sell all their old laptops, flooding their market and making them insanely cheap, ThinkPads being the most well known for this.

Now, in places like the US there are a lot of stores for this, such as eBay. But I'm in Greece and I'm not keen on international orders (shipping costs, potential tariffs if extra-European, several other reasons).

Does anyone know of any (trustworthy) stores for used ThinkPads in Greece? I've looked at some already and they have some nice deals (particularly on T495s, X1s and T14s) but I want to make sure I'm getting the full picture.

UPDATE: After flashing coreboot with the option to "Enable ECC if supported", ECC RAM still does not work. The screen and lights come on and the speakers emit a continuous high tone. The memory tested was an 8GB stick of 2Rx8 EP3L-12800E from SK Hynix. It is unbuffered ECC to the best of my knowledge. I'll write up my thoughts on corebooting this particular board when I have used it for some more time.

After learning that the 3612QE itself supports ECC RAM in contrast to the stock CPU options and that the QM77 chipset also does, I purchased a DDR3 SODIMM with unbuffered ECC. I have not been aware of any other attempts to test this combination.

The machine did not POST and did not produce any beep codes. Absolutely no response to any input aside from shutting down when briefly holding the power button. Everything returned to normal upon putting the original RAM back.

I suspect the BIOS lacks support, but whether this changes with coreboot remains unknown to me, at least until I learn