Recovering a password-protected ThinkPad T60
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I wish this were possible with current-day phones. I've had multiple instances of a friend or relative either buying or getting handed an older iphone, and if the previous owner did the responsible thing of resetting the phone beforehand, it will refuse to get past initial setup without a stable wifi connection and the previous owner's icloud credentials. Tracing down the previous owner and getting them to change their password or disable the "find my" feature for this one time operation is harder than you'd think, especially if it was passed down multiple hands or the account is from a different person (and the original owner was never aware). In some of these instances we've had no choice but to throw the brick away.
[0] https://blog.elcomsoft.com/2020/05/iphone-usb-restricted-mod...
[1] https://blog.elcomsoft.com/2020/07/checkra1n-usb-restriction...
The tradeoff is very reasonable: People need to actively engage in the process of relinquishing control over a device that's essentially become an extension of the mind
These are expensive devices and theft happens.
It obviously doesn't stop the supply chain of stolen parts but it makes it so legitimate consumers will ask questions and legitimate stores will be less likely to buy stolen phones for parts.
In this case, Apple has forcibly become the gatekeeper for all parts, both used and new, and has plausible reasons for why this is good for the customer. It's really quite brilliant.
Frankly, I'm fine spending an extra $50 if I break something vs depriving the market of stolen iPhones. Like everything, there are costs and benefits.
Eventually my wife got fed up of boxes of bits of laptops everywhere.
I'm still wondering if it would be profitable today.
Probably not. Post covid, the laptop glut is huge and prices have declined to negligible.
It would be nice to have a cheap Linux laptop to play around in a Linux desktop environment.
I use exclusively apple M1 kit now and keep Linux in the cloud. I honestly can’t go back now to a thinkpad.
I had a post on Reddit shit it and people kept finding years later. I would receive a message every once in a while about it, until they stopped completely.
This SuperUser answer explains it as well: https://superuser.com/a/1633143
Can anyone recommend a newer laptop with a nice keyboard? I find all new laptops keyboards feel like a flat piece of plastic.
The m.2 NVME drive is also upgradeable, as is the wireless card. My only real complaint is that the display suffers from backlight bleed along the edges in my unit. That said, the display is also pretty dang great: anti-glare coated, high-refresh, bright, and color accurate.
[1] https://asus-linux.org/ [2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/ASUS-ROG-More-With-Linux-6.1
My current 13" Ryzen 5800 laptop is no slouch but its Vega iGPU is a bit too long in the tooth for any kind of games, screen could be brighter and battery life could be better. I'm very excited for a laptop upgrade next year.
I usually don’t even consider laptops with dedicated nvidia graphics because dealing with nvidia drivers is more hassle than gain (I don’t do anything gpu-intensive and the intel gpu is enough for me).
A physical mux means you can effectively shut down the dedicated graphics but still drive outputs with the intel embedded gpu. And save battery.
Can that laptop do that?
The most recent laptops with an actual nice Thinkpad keyboard were X220 or T420, everything after that is chiclets.
I agree that the Sandy Bridge era (2011) ThinkPads were the last to have a proper 7 row keyboard layout, but there's slightly more to it.
ThinkPad keyboards are made by a variety of OEMs. For the 2011 models, the manufacturers were NMB, Chicony and Alps. The consensus within the ThinkPad enthusiast community is that keyboards from NMB offered the best typing feel, followed Chicony and finally Alps.
You can tell if you have a NMB keyboard by carefully prising off one of the keycaps: if you see a red rubber dome, it's a NMB keyboard. (grey = Chicony; white = Alps). Each keyboard manufacturer has a unique part number (FRU - field replaceable unit in the IBM/Lenovo parlance). Online sellers often mix and match FRUs, so it can't be relied upon to get the NMB keyboard - you need to ask the seller what colour the domes are. The NMB keyboards are sadly becoming more rare and expensive by the day.
FWIW, chiclet machines often had better feel than the 7-row predecessors. E.g. T440p with non-backlit keyboard. This is due to improvements in chassis design - the T440p's magnesium alloy rollcage was solid underneath the keyboard, resulting in 0 keyboard flex.
(I hear ThinkPad is trying that a abomination again, which means my t25 may have to live another 5 years)
There is a gaming laptop with mechanical keys also.
Is it really a case and there is a reason for WiFi chip degradation?
Had an empty password been any other value, such as 0x00, this trick would not work
We use a password generator, but it happens that some machine cannot be unlocked. We don't assume malice, but the biggest error source is probably data enter error when setting it. You cannot see what you type and in real life it has happened that obviously the same typo was made twice, but later we have not been able to guess what it was.