I won the ebay bidding war at 100€ +p&p for a Thinkpad p14s gen 1 with broken graphics and/or screen.

No ssd (but I have a 256GB spare) and 32GB ram and a hub.

After tinkering yesterday (sometimes it'd boot, all up to a linux on a usb stick before freezing, sometimes not at all) I let it be and continued today. Screen totally black, not a sign except the fan spinning for a second or two at power. No sign on the external screen. Nothing to do it seemed. So I opened it, removed the battery and ran on usb power. No change. Removed the 16GB (the other 16GB is soldered) and lo and behold, it's the ram socket!

So I'm a happy laptop user now 😁!

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[–] 23 points 5 months ago (1 child)

test the sodimm. could have been (and more likely to be) bad ram, not a bad slot.

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  • [–] [S] 3 points 5 months ago

    Did try with a 2666 8GB ok stick, same conundrum.

    The interesting part is that according to the manual, the soldered ram is 3200 but runs at 2600 (or 2666 I don't remember). So maybe it has to be 3200 ram for some bizarre reason, and the 16GB one is faulty. Or the slot is bad.

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  • [–] 16 points 5 months ago* (2 children)

    Now you sell that stick of ram and make back the whole price of the laptop lul

    Have you tried cleaning the ram socket with a soft brush and 99% alcohol? Then let try before resocketing for a while of course

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  • [–] 11 points 5 months ago* (1 child)

    Please test that stick before selling it to someone (or at least sell it cheap and say it's untested). It's much more likely the ram is bad than the slot.

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  • [–] [S] 3 points 5 months ago

    I wouldn't sell it untested of course ( sell it as such would only attract buyers that would resell it as good).

    I did test with an ok 8GB 2666 stick (the manual says the soldered is 3200 but runs at 2666 ?!), I might investigate further one day...

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  • [–] 4 points 5 months ago

    Awesome. I love it when a plan eventually comes together.

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