Re: crappy laptop company

> It's too bad ThinkPad used to be a quality product when IBM made them > but it's just bargain basement zombie-brand China junk, now.

Buy a used Dell commercial-grade laptop on eBay for under $100, delivered. Pick one that has the hard drive removed for security, and then buy a new SSD in whatever size you need. For about $120 or so, you will have a VERY good and reliable laptop.

I got a Dell latitude E6510 for my daughter, and she is real happy with it. This specific model came with 3 different screen resolutions, you can tell them apart by the service code on the bottom, or if they show the bootup screen in the listing. The sellers usually don't know the difference, so the price is usually the same. I got that one for $90 delivered, without hard drive.

Jon

Reply to
Jon Elson
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Just a heads up if the Dell comes with a Nvidia graphics card. Mine would blue screen when streaming audio. I discovered that it was the graphics card driver on the Dell website causing the problem. Two years after purchase, the Dell driver was still faulty. The driver on the Nvidia website worked fine.

Reply to
Chuck

On a laptop, that would be a chip, not a card. But, yes, there are some incompatibilities between some graphics chips and certain operating systems. I have a desktop that has the Intel i810 chip on the motherboard, and certain Linux OS versions have real trouble with it. The easy fix was to plug in a graphics card. I think it WAS an Nvidia card that solved the problem, in this case. But, of course, you can't do that on a laptop.

Jon

Reply to
Jon Elson

The last Dell laptop I had used a three-wire PSU that locked you in to buying only Dell-branded power bricks. There's a lockout chip on the brick that communicates with the motherboard and if it detects it's not Dell OEM it prevents the battery from charging at full speed and throttles the processor. down to 400MHz.

the way it does this is the BIOS flips a bit in the processor register set called BD_PROCHOT which is a flag from the motherboard temperature sensor, and fools the processor into thinking the temperature sensor on the motherboard is saying the system is overheating. It does this if it doesn't receive the proper readout from the power supply brick.

fortunately it's easy to flip it back by running a program or script on startup, with root access, and then everything works fine again lol. this is some hopefully cross-platform C code that does just that:

#include #include #include #include

#define BUFSIZE (64)

int get_msr_value(uint64_t* reg_value) { const char* cmd = "rdmsr -u 0x1FC"; char cmd_buf[BUFSIZE];

FILE* fp;

if ((fp = popen(cmd, "r")) == NULL) { printf("Error opening pipe!\n"); return -1; }

cmd_buf[strcspn(fgets(cmd_buf, BUFSIZE, fp), "\n")] = 0; *reg_value = atoi(cmd_buf);

if (pclose(fp)) { printf("Command not found or exited with error status\n"); return -1; }

return 0; }

int main(void) { const char* cmd = "wrmsr -a 0x1FC"; char* concat_cmd; int ret; uint64_t* reg_value = &(uint64_t){0};

if ((ret = get_msr_value(reg_value))) { return ret; }

printf("Old register value: %lu\n", *reg_value);

*reg_value = *reg_value & 0xFFFFFFFE; // clear bit 0

printf("New register value: %lu\n", *reg_value);

if (asprintf(&concat_cmd, "%s %i", cmd, *reg_value) == -1) return -1;

printf("Executing: %s\n", concat_cmd);

system(concat_cmd); free(concat_cmd);

return 0; }

Reply to
bitrex

Or OS-agnostic, rather, asprintf call may IIRC be gcc/**ix specific though.

Reply to
bitrex

I've never seen that on Dell's corporate range of laptops, only on the low-end retail things. The corporate ones usually are capable of docking or using different size PSUs depending on needs so are left 'flexible'. Also they've been using the same 19V rating and connector now for quite a while so that customers can use their old PSUs and docking stations. (That said the latest Dell 'docking stations' are in fact wireless so not really docking stations at all.)

--
Shaun. 

"Humans will have advanced a long, long way when religious belief has a cozy little classification  
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Reply to
~misfit~

The older ones I have just have a resistor on the center pin that tells the charger in the laptop whether this is a 60W or 90W power supply. But, they ALWAYS have to keep making things harder, more complicated, to lock out competition. Groan...

Jon

Reply to
Jon Elson

Yeah, we're talking about 1996, maybe?

Jon

Reply to
Jon Elson

Even now. Putting a laptop on the bed on top of the covers for example, versus on top of an airy permeated surface that allows plenty of air circulation. That's why data centers have so much refrigeration, right?

Reply to
bruce2bowser

It's still a problem. A friend got the top of his legs burned by a laptop.

--
"I am a river to my people." 
Jeff-1.0 
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Reply to
Fox's Mercantile

I keep a piece of 2mm hardboard the same size as my laptop in my laptop bag and always use it under my laptop if it's not being used on a hard surface. It maintains clearances for air gaps. Common sense really...

--
Shaun. 

"Humans will have advanced a long, long way when religious belief has a cozy little classification  
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Reply to
~misfit~

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