Lots of Lenovo!
-- Not sure I'd call it "dumpster diving" but all of these system were headed that way --
A couple months back, a friend gave me a Lenovo T440 - he had gotten it from one of his
customers because the wifi had failed - he took it apart and changed the wifi module, only
to have it say something like "The system can't startup because there is a non-Lenovo wifi
card installed - please replace with a Lenovo card".
He tried pulling the card, but then it wouldn't start at all, so he decided to put it in his "to be
recycled" pile - I happened to notice it, asked about it, and he told me the story with "take it
if you want it - there's an SSD in it and perhaps you can use some of the other parts".
When I took it apart, I noticed that he had just left the antenna wires for the wifi loose on the
bottom below the mainboard. They have little metal caps for connectors, and as the system is
very tight inside could be shorting something, I just put some black tape over them to insulate,
re-assembled and it came right up! When I told him I'd gotten it working, he said he didn't want
it back (he does some I.T. support and a fair number of older systems go through his hands
anyway)
It's actually a fairly impressive system - I7 with 12G ram, and an SSD - so very fast! It's also very
small/thin (about as thin as my chromebook) all the while having a decent sized screen - As it's so
small, it only has two external USB ports, I didn't want to tie them both up with wifi and bluetooth...
but I managed to find a single USB dongal that did both -- all working well for me!
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Another friend just gave me her old Lenovo laptop - an "IdeaPad S145" - I don't know what it's specs
are because we can't "get in" to it. She's always had fairly major problems, very slow... (think sometimes
an hour to boot) A couple places she had taken it to told her they thought the hard-drive was bad - but she
didn't want to change it because it had come with pre-installed packages that she uses a LOT (and weren't
part of the recovery image [which we also wouldn't have access to it we change the drive]).
She was using a "pin" to login, but she thinks it was updating when she put it away last time and the
battery ran-out during.. it still boots, but it won't recognize her pin any more!
I mainly wanted it to see if it's Lenovo wifi chip would work in the T440... But I think I'll change out the drive,
put a fresh Win10 on it and see how it goes - I know her brother could really use a newer system (his XP laptop
is very out of date these days).
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My son just gave me a Lenovo "ThinkCenter M600" this is a little cute and TINY desktop (I'd guess 6" square
by 1" high). He had gotten it from the same friend that gave me the T440 - I'd put Win10 on it and we set it up
as a PLEX server for him. It had some trouble if multiple clients were active, so he has just gotten a much more
powerful (and still about the same size) Win11 system - and gave it back to me (I can always use of another system,
especially when it's so tiny!)
Dave ::: https://dunfield.themindfactory.com ::: "Daves Old Computers"->Personal