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Once a year, a local street has a 'street wide' garage sale. Not everyone participates but it draws a fair amount of people. This year, I brought a swag bag with me. Other people have tote bags or even little wagons to carry their loot home with them. It's a fairly long street and it took me an hour to hit all the sales.
I didn't get much: a DVD, a cute little fan, a Dell power brick and a laptop. It's a Lenovo T420s. Originally came with an i5 processor and Windows 7. The laptop was on a table that was rather delicately balanced and when I picked up the lappy to inspect it, the table tipped over dumping half of it's contents on the ground. Most embarrassing. Although the laptop had a charger with it there was a note saying that it needed a new power jack and a hard drive. A little honesty for a change! It was worth the risk at 10 dollars.
Putting my multi meter on the power plug I discovered the charger was indeed dead. I have a multi-adapter for laptops and got the battery so start charging. And it POSTs! but doesn't recognize the hard drive. I had a real time hard time breaking into the BIOS as some of the keys seemed to be funky, but figured out how to boot off a CD or a USB.
I got it to boot all the way into Xunbuntu but it seemed like there was a bunch of stuck keys and things just opened by themselves. By plugging in a USB keyboard I managed to shut the machine down gracefully.
After downloading the manual I checked for the hard drive... and discovered they removed both the hard drive and the carrier for it. So, a hard drive carrier, replacement keyboard and a cheap SSD are going on my Amazon list. The lappy is beat up but I should be able to resurrect it fairly inexpensively.
-m
I didn't get much: a DVD, a cute little fan, a Dell power brick and a laptop. It's a Lenovo T420s. Originally came with an i5 processor and Windows 7. The laptop was on a table that was rather delicately balanced and when I picked up the lappy to inspect it, the table tipped over dumping half of it's contents on the ground. Most embarrassing. Although the laptop had a charger with it there was a note saying that it needed a new power jack and a hard drive. A little honesty for a change! It was worth the risk at 10 dollars.
Putting my multi meter on the power plug I discovered the charger was indeed dead. I have a multi-adapter for laptops and got the battery so start charging. And it POSTs! but doesn't recognize the hard drive. I had a real time hard time breaking into the BIOS as some of the keys seemed to be funky, but figured out how to boot off a CD or a USB.
I got it to boot all the way into Xunbuntu but it seemed like there was a bunch of stuck keys and things just opened by themselves. By plugging in a USB keyboard I managed to shut the machine down gracefully.
After downloading the manual I checked for the hard drive... and discovered they removed both the hard drive and the carrier for it. So, a hard drive carrier, replacement keyboard and a cheap SSD are going on my Amazon list. The lappy is beat up but I should be able to resurrect it fairly inexpensively.
-m
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