Hacker News Reader

Comment by meibo | Hacker News Reader

Even on old + modern thinkpads it feels like a lottery which hardware feature will stop working at a particular time, with the distros i've worked myself through.

Ethernet, waking up from sleep mode, brightness adjustment... take your pick.

View on HN

I discovered last week, to my chagrin, that the RAM on my x1 carbon Stinkpad was starting to fail--memtest x86+ confirmed it. Memory corruption is insidious, so I rushed to the internet to buy new DIMMs, opened the sucker up...and there's no DIMM. The RAM is just soldered into the motherboard. No upgrade, no fix. This is now a pile of unreliable junk that randomly flips bits in memory. So data evac commences, with MD5 hashes and double, trip-checking everything.

A reminder that not only software bitrots, but hardware too. Make sure not to buy a Stinkpad (or any hardware) with non-replaceable parts!

(and I just bought an M1 Macbook Pro...)

If you can pinpoint which pages are affected (in most cases you can), you can just add that range to the blacklist.

Can work in the meantime, before you have a new machine.

There were dozens of ranges, too many to blacklist. Which made me suspect that it might actually be the memory controller. In which case, it's totally F'd. But given this I went for total data evac.

Couldn’t you just move the disk to another device and read it from there instead of risking data corruption or going through all the hassle of comparing checksums?

Perhaps. It has an SSD, so I'd need a thingie like this adapter to do that: https://www.amazon.com/SATA-Adapter-Thinkpad-Lenovo-Carbon/d...

But I don't have a SATA reader either, so I'd need one of those :-)

Buying a mac after complaining about how you can't replace ram seems a bit odd.

Feelings, not reason, probably applied there. At least it the logic was consistent in both cases.

It was a decision I was considering for months, the memory corruption just forced it. I didn't expect software to be this far behind. I was aware that the RAM and everything is even less upgradeable than a Stinkpad, but I am hoping this machine is more reliable overall and it will give me 5+ years of service. (My last Macbook Pro from 2010 was still kicking up until 2018, when I switched to the Stinkpad because keyboard.).

Yeah, I know. But the chip kicks butt :)

Software will catch up with the M1, I hope!

> Software will catch up with the M1, I hope!

Can't wait for [Your least favourite Electron App] to use even more CPU cycles!

I'm not sure how buying a M1 macbook pro will help considering it also has soldered ram?

> Make sure not to buy a Stinkpad (or any hardware) with non-replaceable parts!

Correct - that is why I bought a Thinkpad X1 Extreme - both SSD and RAM are user replaceable. Granted its not as thin as X1 Carbon but I don't need to carry it around much so that is not a big issue for me.

I dont really understand why modern devs can't carry a 5 pound laptop. Its not exactly a burden.

5 pounds is pretty heavy.

I was more so referring to the Linux experience, haven't had any troubles with ThinkPad hardware as of yet but I know that there are complaints around it as of late :)

Though, if you want a serviceable system, I'd stay away from Apple - the RAM in your new M1 mac is actually included in the SoC, not sure how much you'd like to get in there!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com