Ask HN: What are some interesting projects to reuse your old devices?

Re:Ask HN: What are some interesting projects to reuse your ... by rezgi on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @04:28AM (#22167795)

Enterprise ThinkPads are amazing machines. They're very sturdy (although the X230 notoriously has a weak screw holder in the top left (or is it right?) corner that will almost always break and make that corner of the case a bit wobbly. Annoying but not critical. And the i7 top of the range version that comes with the 180GB Intel SSD... Well, the SSD is bad and can be thrown out. It has a bug in its firmware that was never fixed by Intel and never acknowledged by Lenovo so no recall, and no fix. Just throw it away and replace with a 256-512 GB SSD.

And the parts are cheap and plentiful. Get the docking station if you can, I paid 30$ for two a few years ago (top of the range dock, the one with all the connectors and 2x video out)

Also, the IPS upgrade is well worth it.

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Re:Ask HN: What are some interesting projects to reuse your ... by cookiengineer on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @04:04PM (#22174009)

Using a t440p base as my laptop, best laptop for the buck. bought it as a 4300m model with a dual core. now it has an IPS display, better coreboot+bios update, 32gb ram, i7-4712, 2x 512gb ssds plus a 4tb hdd. all together cost me less than 600eur. hackintosh compatible if necessary, though it's running Arch these days.

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Re:Ask HN: What are some interesting projects to reuse your ... by shrikant on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @09:38AM (#22169717)

While I agree with this, I have an Intel graphics version of the T430 (running Ubuntu) and it doesn't seem to play nice with two external monitors, even with the "fully loaded" docking station :(

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Re:Ask HN: What are some interesting projects to reuse your ... by bblough on Wednesday January 29, 2020 @03:37PM (#22185524)

I had external display issues as well, with a T440 and an UltraDock under Debian. It was mostly flickering and blinking of the outputs, but occasionally a display wouldn't come out of powersave mode.

You may have already found and tried these possible fixes, but just in case you haven't-

1) There's a firmware update for the docks that is supposed to resolve a number of display issues.

2) It appears that similar issues can be caused by having a defective or incorrectly-sized dock power supply. So replacing the power supply with a known-good and/or bigger power supply might help.

Though, in my case, neither of the above helped. It turns out I had a bad HDMI/VGA adapter. Since eliminating that, I've had zero display issues. But I'm guessing that probably doesn't apply to you, since my configuration is a little unconventional.

Anyway, I hope you find something that fixes it for you.

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Re:Ask HN: What are some interesting projects to reuse your ... by opless on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @07:24AM (#22168695)

IPS upgrade?

Tell me more!

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Re:Ask HN: What are some interesting projects to reuse your ... by severine on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @08:06AM (#22168957)

https://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=126294

https://syonyk.blogspot.com/2019/02/thinkpad-t430s-ips-scree...

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Re:Ask HN: What are some interesting projects to reuse your ... by opless on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @10:16AM (#22170104)

Thanks! Though they seem to be x430s rather than the X230s :/

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Re:Ask HN: What are some interesting projects to reuse your ... by mindslight on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @11:00AM (#22170534)

Some of the x230 configurations shipped with IPS screens, so you can just obtain one of those (or a compatible replacement) and swap it in. The resolution is still 1366x768. Beware of sellers falsely claiming "IPS".

Alternatively, you can do a bit of soldering/modding and put in an aftermarket 1920x1080 panel. https://nitrocaster.me/store/x220-x230-fhd-mod-kit.html

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Re:Ask HN: What are some interesting projects to reuse your ... by opless on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @02:15PM (#22173021)

Oh. My.

This!!!

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