mhmm when I was in need of a machine ... the only machines I was able to find sold here where from the W series; all merchants only had the 1680x1050 versions of the T series.
I got a ton of R61s and R500s from the California DOT in an auction and they arrived in similar condition, except worse is they had no WLAN cards. Like everything else I can source locally for a few bucks, but the WLAN cards are specific to the motherboard and the machines won't boot with the wrong one due to the whitelist.
1920x1200 was an option direct from Lenovo. Due to the increased cost it's unlikely you would have found any in a brick and mortar store with that screen.
We can't lose our wifi passwords!
There were cracked bioses around that had the whitelist removed. [fuck whitelists]
I had to use them becaus of the HSDPA addincard I added
brick and mortar is a good joke - you wont find thinkpads at Mediamarkt or Saturn here; even the specialized retailers had no 1920er Ts back than.
And direct from lenovo had an estimated 8-10 weeks which was way to long and not an option.
I looked in my T400s and was really surprised to see that they all have not one, not two, but three mPCIe slots. Bit of a shame because mSata only became a thing after 2009 but was interesting nonetheless. One is populated by the Intel wireless chipset, but the other two can be used for a wireless broadband card and a wUSB card or an Intel Turbo memory cache, respectively.
Would be nice if I could find an mPCIe to mSata adapter card where the SSD piggybacks on the adapter, and the adapter has a little ASMedia controller on there or something. But I doubt the BIOS would ever willingly support that, especially for boot. Maybe, maybe not.
I did notice that the BIOS does list three SATA interfaces though. Never found the third one.
One of those mPCIe slots is going to be a sata dingus, I can bet on it. But if you wanted something in that slot IBM or lenovo, whoever, had proprietary things for that slot.
After using these types of Strange aspect ratios, like 5:4 and 3:2 I feel like there are much more superior for laptops than the general 16:9 or 16:10. Sadly they aren't common. But thankfully they will be soon for tablets.
Key word is 'were'. All hosts for the unlocked BIOS have been removed from the internet as far as I can tell. I spent days digging through archived hosts and sketchy chinese websites to get the one ROM and it just doesn't exist anymore. I need to find someone who still has it somewhere on a drive if I want to get it.
Yep the T61p had three as well. WLAN, WWAN, and then a universal. The R500 has two but an empty spot for another below the CPU.
Damn... i just had to throw away the dead body of my W500 halve year ago when I was forced to clean out my "office"... it was on the rom =/
The W500, T500 and R500 all have a different whitelist. Hell, the R500 has two different ones because they had a dedicated GPU version. So yeah the one I need for those laptops there is only the one version of and it's lost in multitudes of outdated fileshare links and shutdown host sites.
Even the Internet Archive links which are supposed to be active don't have it anymore. It's just gone.
white-listing should be illegal - m2c
I don't disagree, but it keeps the OEM out of hot water by eliminating the possibility of using unauthorized hardware that could cause problems. It's just easier to whitelist specific hardware than to take a chance that somebody will try to claim warranty on a machine (especially the expensive ones) that they broke by modding hardware. If there's a whitelist than the OEM can prove that it wasn't the fault of their product, but the user.
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Hey, blacklisting should be illegal. Makes jobs harder for hardware hackers like me >:UU
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^This, I'm not sure about using USB WLAN cards because that's harder to take advantage of them, whitelisting those seems to be a bit anticompetitive, but I can see why they would lock down the mPCIe slots and whitelist what you can put in them, because if you can access just one lane of the PCIe bus you basically have unfettered access to the CPU and you can do some really egregious shit.
I also want to note that you can hack the hardware down to level..... 3? and worm firmware through to replace what checks everything.
I had a little dell laptop once that I couldn't use certain stuff in so I cracked it so the hardware worked.... For a while. The machine didn't die the WLAN was just a piece of shit :P
Routers and cable boxes are more fun to screw with though.