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Comment by philliphaydon | Hacker News Reader

At this point I wouldn’t buy any non-Lenovo laptop.

I don’t know any other brand (excluding framework) that has a web page where I can enter the model number of my laptop and buy any part and order it and repair the laptop myself.

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I will only buy a Lenovo laptop if it comes with a BSD and Linux friendly WiFi chipset. Most of their laptops are whitelist-only when it comes to WiFi cards, and tracking down the correct brand and revision of a specific compatible module is not worth the time invested. I have a stack of older Lenovo laptops that I've acquired in an attempt to reverse-engineer the BIOS/UEFI whitelists. Smarter people than me have been able to make it work on certain models, but overall Lenovo seems to detest the idea of a power user daring to switch to a better/more compatible WiFi module, despite their reputation for being "hacker's laptops".

It's for this reason the next, and probably last, laptop I buy will be the Framework.

I’ve had 3 so far. All upgrades the wifi from 5 to 6e and had no issues with ubuntu, manjaro, or windows with changing between Realtek?, killer, and ONK. Tho all are supporting amd/intel and windows/linux. Some Brand’s are intel only.

And yet you find very little information about the actual hardware in recent Lenovos. For example, i had the unpleasant surprise to discover that M.2 2242 in modern Thinkpads only supports wireless cards, and that i had just purchased a rare-to-find (in my area) 2242 SSD for nothing.

Don't even get me started on how ** the hardware is now to open and replace parts, compared to my previous T60. (soldered RAM? really?)

EDIT: I'm not at all claiming other mainstream vendors are any better. I've never found any decent hardware besides old Thinkpads and Macs.

E-Key is for wifi cards. B+M-Key are for the old SSD, most slots for nvme are M-Key.

I’m not sure why this is a Lenovo issue…

Except you can use PSRef from lenovo and find out most of that info including if the model you bought has soldered memory or not...

I recently installed a Toshiba RC100 into my T480's WWAN slot. Are the newer models worse in this aspect? The T480 is not the newest, but still pretty modern.

You will be very happy with this new laptop then: https://frame.work/

Every internal component has a QR code sticker on it pointing to a web page with the specs, replacements, etc.

See: https://youtu.be/0rkTgPt3M4k

I assume that's why they wrote "excluding framework".

Is Framework available in a non-silver case? Ideally black or dark grey...

Not yet I don't think. They're very new and working with limited resources right now.

You could potentially find some vinyl wraps for it. Dbrand sells them.

I think Dell and HP offer somewhat comparable sites.

Dell: https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/partsforyourdell/index HP: https://partsurfer.hp.com/search.aspx

HP also does it and they even have videos on youtube from hp support explaining how to replace each of the parts.

Lenovo has lost a lot of the quality in comparison. Typos in documentation and invoices, all kinds of support service nightmares even for people with most expensive support policies, X1 Extreme G4 shitty heatsink, thermal throttling to 800MHz, just take a look at forums.lenovo.com

I’ve repaired numerous non-lenovo laptops, it just required googling rather than an official web-page.

Sure, but for example, I was living in Singapore, prior to moving to Taiwan I sold my desktops and replaced them with laptops.

My wife needs a Traditional Chinese, so I went on Lenovo website, entered the product number in found this page:

https://pcsupport.lenovo.com/sg/en/products/laptops-and-netb...

Got the part numbers:

UpperCaseASM_TCL82JQSGw/RGBWRF Part Number: 5CB1C14972

Then went to the Lenovo store and ordered the part, then replaced it.

It's not about googling, its about the manufacturer having this itself. I don't know if Dell or HP do anything similar.

That's pretty cool — but not worth working with a vendor that's known to ship rootkits/malware.

Yeah I dont get the first commenter, Lenovo is great !