Laptop Fun

[Tom]

So I've been having issues with my big laptop for a while now. Things were getting gradually more and more unstable as time went on. About a month or two ago I thought I narrowed it down to a memory slot being broken. Fast forward to today when the Lenovo dude came over to fix it, he replaces the motherboard and lo and behold the problem got /worse/. I am now running on a single stick of ram as populating any other slots now causes the laptop to hang on or before post. He's now ordering a new CPU for me, as he (and I) suspect the memory controller has croaked it good.

I'm currently running in windows on 8GB ram instead of linux with 32GB ram (woe is me #firstworldproblems). Oddly, I can't get linux to boot at the moment. the main SATA drives seem to not want to always initialize in time for the os to assemble things properly. I dunno, its been like that since the problems started appearing, except now its worse.... So yeah, till monday i get to run on windows, and I don't DARE let it upgrade me to win10 till i know the hw problems are fixed.

Also, I dropped my small/travel laptop (thinkpad x220) at the airport and at the very least, a hinge is busted. not sure if it works, but i might try getting it to run... just to have my precious linux back for the weekend

[Mr. Analog]

B'OH

[Tom]

Yeah. I just disassembled and re-assembled the small laptop. Since its one of those magnesium bases, I need to get an entirely new bottom cover. Not super cheap either. like $70cad after shipping, and that's from some random ebay seller. It's like $140 from lenovo. As it is, it works fine, I just have to be careful how i open/close the lid. I ordered a new base cover and it'll arrive in a couple weeks. AND because my big laptop is on the fritz, i'll be using the small laptop for my every day stuff for the weekend. IT IS SO HARD to efficiently use a windows box to work on unix/linux machines. So annoying.

Good thing was that it was relatively simple to disassemble/reassemble the small laptop. It was much simpler than my old Thinkpad SL500. MUCH.

[Mr. Analog]

Man, for $70 you could get a decent wireless keyboard

[Tom]

Man, for $70 you could get a decent wireless keyboard

Haha. but it didn't hurt the keybaord. it broke the connection between the screen hinge and the laptop body. Basically the left hinge isn't physically attached to anything anymore. the right side seems a bit bent too. i just don't want to have to fight with the broken hinge, and $70 is a lot cheaper than buying a new-used laptop.

Though i do have a decent wireless keyboard. It's a logitech K360. I use it for my media box. It's decent looking, light, fairly sturdy, and the distance and battery life it gets is great.

[Mr. Analog]

Ooooh, yeah that's rough man

Sent from my SGH-I317M using Tapatalk

[Tom]

Ooooh, yeah that's rough man

Yeah, not a lot of damage but since its a magnesium uni-body like thing, the whole base gets to be replaced. lol. Oh well.

[Mr. Analog]

Yeah. Ughhhh :-(

Sent from my SGH-I317M using Tapatalk

[Tom]

Big laptop seems to be fixed! all it took was two system boards, and a new cpu! Though it may have just been the first replacement being funky? Who knows. I think he just left me with the new cpu and mobo.

[Mr. Analog]

Huzzah!

[Tom]

Soo, I'm seeing the chrome crashes i was before.... SSoooo yeah. We'll see what happens after a memtest.

[Mr. Analog]

Is it only Chrome that crashes?

[Tom]

Is it only Chrome that crashes?

I'm not entirely sure. Chrome tabs, plugins, and the chrome wrapper process once crashed. Some other stuff might have, but im not sure if its related to the problems. Its also not crashing in the same places. the kernel logs show its crashing in various places/system-libs. So it smells like a hw problem. But its possible that some files were corrupted due to the previous hw issues.

It's basically the same behaviour i was seeing before i tried to "fix" the laptop by doing some testing, which made it worse, so i called the repair guy, who made it even worse, who replaced both the cpu and motherboard (mobo twice). So yeah. fun times.

[Thorin]

Hope you get it figured out, man.