spv

noooo i have work and shit

oh god... that's even more expensive. but my life will never be complete without it...

you motherfucker.

i wore a pink spandex suit to class enough days last semester that a prof of mine said to me -- immediately before a final exam i forgot about and wore a FUCKING PINK SUIT TO, and that i fucking ACED -- "[spv], you're cool, you have a way of making the strangest things seem normal"

to which i replied "i'm just gonna take that as a compliment?"

"i meant it that way, you're, you're cool"

it was so uncomfy... lmao

firstly, i greatly appreciate the offer, and thank you for it, but i use a model m every day, and have another "awaiting repairs" in my basement -- send it to someone who needs it! start a thread!

secondly, i use a coreboot'd thinkpad already. i want something heaver, jankier, and more "starts a conversation with CS-students". adding a 4g modem with a gigantic antenna (like i have laying around) would be even funnier.

i want to build something that i bring to class one day, people lose their shit, and then people just get used to it.

"expensive", "huge", and "barely portable" -- throw in "impractical", "ridiculous", and "functional" and you've described my taste exactly

i used to bring a model m to compsci classes in high school because i was bored, and my prof didn't mind lmao

i didn't believe you, so i looked it up that is so fucking moronic LMAO

seems like that certain point is now, if not very, very soon :P

thank you very much! upon more thought, i think the chips are probably fine. i'll try flashing a known good in ~2hrs.

if already flashed, one can use flashprog -p internal. on the stock bios, at most you may be able to hack together a method to flash coreboot, but you can't neuter the ME, nor recover the megabytes of flash the ME firmware uses.

not sure about the t540p, but the t440p isn't too hard to externally flash. two screws to get inside, then the various internal screws (most of which are identical), remove the keyboard & trackpad, the VGA port screws, and then your flash chips are exposed. hook up an SOIC8 clip (on ebay for ~$5) to a pi pico, flash pico-serprog, and then use flashprog on another machine to flash the chips.

once successfully flashed, you can easily update coreboot from within the OS. however, if you flash a broken build, -- whether it's a lack of vendor blobs, like for the (neutered) ME, or simply a BIOS that can't get you to your OS (or a rescue USB) -- you will need to reflash externally before the machine will be usable again.

with a mild undervolt (~ -50mV core, cache, GPU), i hit ~85 C on sustained loads (~3GHz on battery), though i've seen it in the high 90s when closed on sustained loads. i actually cooked my speakers that way, need to buy a new set, lmao. at least they can be swapped easily

i don't have the dGPU heatsink, if that's what you're asking. stock heatsink, repasted + an undervolt seems to be sufficient to tame the beast.

i highly recommend the BIOS mod if you can swing it. i run a custom coreboot build (seabios + grub), so it shows my logo on boot, has a custom BIOS password routine (rolled it myself!), and i have full disk encryption (even /boot!) for debian, with the grub in flash handling LUKS2.

my only complaint is boot times, GRUB can take nearly a minute to unlock the disk, due to non-existent SSE code. if that was taken care of, it could probably unlock in a couple seconds. (note to self, summer project!)

they are -- i have 2 (daily driver & the fuck-around-box)

my daily is maxed out -- 1080p IPS, backlit keyboard, t450p trackpad, 4910MQ, 16GB ram, and a 4g modem :P

the fuckaround has a 1080p TN, stock keyboard & trackpad, 4300M(?), and like 8 or 12 GB or something

they're not socketed, are they? i have virtually zero soldering experience

edit: the chips are the W25Q32FV & W25Q64FV. both are rather cheap wholesale, at ~$0.40 / chip. i've just never replaced a chip like this. i did buy a pencil a while back, though, so it could be good to learn.