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Why is buying a laptop so confusing and annoying (hexbear.net)

submitted 18 hours ago by doublepepperoni@hexbear.net to c/chat@hexbear.net

24 comments fedilink hide all child comments

This past year I've been checking local listings for used cheap laptops because it'd be neat to have a small portable Linux machine.

It's just surprisingly difficult to confirm what specs a given model has or to find reviews for it. The sellers don't always do the best job listing the components and googling the model numbers may not give you too many results either. Some manufacturers keep reusing the same model name year after year so you have similarly named computers with wildly different guts, or often a specific model number will only give you very local and very limited results which makes me think some SKUs are only sold in a few countries for a short period of time

Buying phones is much more simple in this regard

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[–] dead@hexbear.net 17 points 17 hours ago (3 children)

If you want a daily driver laptop, get a used business laptop. Businesses sell or recycle their old computers when they upgrade. Business laptop are easy to disassemble and easy to repair, have readily available replacement parts. Lenovo Thinkpad is often recommended. Thinkpad is very Linux compatible, some them you can even replace the motherboard bios with Linux CoreBoot. Dell Lattitude and HP Elitebook are the main competitors to Lenovo Thinkpad.

[–] catter@hexbear.net 8 points 15 hours ago (2 children)

This is what I did and it worked out great. The only extra thing to be aware of is there's a possibility the BIOS may be locked. I can't disable secure boot on mine because of this, which limits my options for Linux distro. Thankfully Mint does everything I want 😄

[–] dead@hexbear.net 12 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago) (1 children)

The manufacturer says that if a bios is locked by a password, you're supposed to replace the motherboard.

One time I bought a Thinkpad laptop with a locked bios for very cheap. The bios password was stored on a rom chip on the motherboard. When the computer booted, I pressed a screwdriver to the pins on the password rom chip to make it unreadable. Then I went to the "set password" screen on the bios, removed the screwdriver, and set a new password.

The bios couldn't read the bios chip because the screwdriver interfered with the chip and the bios thinks no password is set. When I told it to write a new password, I removed the interference so that it could write to the chip.

After I had set a password, the bios allowed me to remove the password by typing the password that I had set.

this looks like a correct guide https://milaq.net/thinkpad-password-removal/

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/cyber-security-expert-defeats-lenovo-laptop-bios-password-with-a-screwdriver

Might not work on newer laptops.

[–] catter@hexbear.net 2 points 8 hours ago

Wow! I had never heard of this. Bookmarked for when I'm feeling up for pulling apart a laptop again. Thank you so much!