Richard

@messaroundery.net

21 Followers 25 Following

Compulsive storyteller with the most random interests.

Section of a Lenovo ThinkPad T420 motherboard, with an arrow pointing to an area where the solder mask was scratched and two SMD components were slightly dislodged by an errant screw.
The laptop's left side hinge mechanism, with broken rusted metal and a screw post that broke off the plastic housing. The screen cable runs close to this mechanism.
Laptop displaying a BIOS screen corrupted by flashing lines.
A Lenovo laptop dock with two USB-C plugs, a third proprietary plug and two guide posts, designed to mechanically fit their ThinkPads only.
Laptop motherboard with a CMOS battery consisting of two NiMH button cells side by side in a green wrapper, attached to red and black wires going to a motherboard connector with visible corrosion on its pins.
Power supply section of the control panel, with charred components and a huge hole on the SMPS control chip.
WD Green M.2 SSD installed inside the ThinkPad. No label as it's on the back of the SSD.
Windows 10 blue screen of death, but the text area is blended with a still from a YouTube video I was watching.
Insides of a small form factor PC with the front drive cage removed and replaced with 7 vertically-mounted 2.5" hard drives, all individually connected to SATA power and data cables.
Dell Latitude E6320 laptop with the palmrest's rubberized coating partially removed in the area to the left of the trackpad, revealing the translucent plastic below.
Nintendo Switch plugged into a powered USB-C dock, displaying its error message about an incompatible dock.
Square circuit board from the USB extension cable, marked "XHUB610". From left to right: wires from the USB cable soldered into 4 of 5 through-hole pads, an unmarked SOIC-14 chip with two small SMD capacitors right below, and an USB-A connector hanging off the right.
8-pin SOIC fan controller chip on one corner of a netbook motherboard. The two middle pins on one side are bridged with a solder blob.
Inside of a netbook's bottom shell, showing two rectangular strips consisting of two stacked thermal pads, each strip attached to the shell's plastic.
Laptop motherboard with a QFN chip removed and replaced with two thin enamel wires, each one bridging a surface mount capacitor (on what used to be the amplifier chip's input side) to a chip pad (on what used to be the output side). Some melted plastic is barely visible on the bottom.
Laptop motherboard with two coin cell battery terminals attached to colored wires going to opposite ends of the board. The red wire is soldered to the positive terminal of the existing CR2032 battery holder, and the black wire is soldered to a ground pad.
Picture of the laptop's motherboard, highlighting the area covered by the bottom access hatch, and the CMOS battery holder just outside the hatch area.
Laptop motherboard with a tall electrolytic capacitor laying on its side. The capacitor is attached to red and black wires, each one soldered to a pin on a component of the CPU voltage regulation circuit.
Full screen ad for OneDrive cloud backup pushed to a Windows 10 machine, reading "let's get you backed up now"
Circuit board with an 8-pin SOIC footprint where the upper 3 pins on both sides have been bridged together with a piece of desoldering braid filled with solder. A questionable soldering job with lots of flux residue, a knocked component and even some melted plastic nearby.
Top from left to right: NVIDIA ION (GT218S) GPU, 512MB DDR3 VRAM, Intel Atom D525 CPU. Bottom: NEC USB3 controller below VRAM, NM10 southbridge under thermal pad.
Top view of a Zotac IONITX-S-E Mini ITX motherboard, with the I/O shield held on with a rubber band. The passive heatsink with Zotac and Cooler Master logos is prominent.
Internals of a small form factor PC, showing two black SATA cables. Both cables have white residue and cracks forming on one end, while the other end has peeled off almost completely, leaving the metallic shielding visible and spreading black rubber flakes of varying sizes around the area.
CrystalDiskInfo window showing an NVMe IM2P33F4 256GB with bad status, 100% health, 1100 GB host writes, 542 power on count, and 65 power on hours. The red Critical Warning attribute's raw value of 8 indicates the drive has gone read-only.
lspci showing an Intel 4 Series + ICH10 chipset system with integrated graphics alongside an NVMe device connected at 5GT/s x4 speed. dd showing a copy from that NVMe at 1.1 GB/s.
Black box marked "USB2.0 Extension Cable" with a cable coming out of one side
Award BIOS screen through noisy 480p analog video
richard@nas:~$ sudo dmesg | grep sdc [ 2.131181] sd 0:0:2:0: [sdc] 3907029168 512-byte logical blocks: (2.00 TB/1.82 TiB) [ 2.131183] sd 0:0:2:0: [sdc] 4096-byte physical blocks [ 2.262290] sd 0:0:2:0: [sdc] Write Protect is off [ 2.262300] sd 0:0:2:0: [sdc] Mode Sense: 7f 00 10 08 [ 2.263324] sd 0:0:2:0: [sdc] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, supports DPO and FUA [ 2.397926] sdc: AHDI sdc1 sdc2 sdc3 sdc4 [ 2.398929] sd 0:0:2:0: [sdc] Attached SCSI disk richard@nas:~$
Box with two printed badges, one for "Windows SE7EN" and another for "Windows VISTA"
WD Blue M.2 SSD box with a 1-month Adobe Creative Cloud offer sticker, expiring October 31 2023
USB-C power meter attached to a phone on one end and nothing on the other end, displaying a power output of 7.496 volts at 0.041 amps.
Apple USB-C to Headphone Jack Adapter front packaging comparison. The old model on the left has a plastic pull tab, while the new model on the right has a paper pull tab.
Creative PCI Audio Configuration Utility shows a warning message with no text
Seagate Secure Laptop Thin HDD, 320 GB, model ST320LT025
Lenovo 65W: E490 Max, 3410 Max; Samsung 25W: E490 20W, 3410 21W off; 3410 USB-C: E490 12W, 3410 0W; USB-A: E490 0W, 3410 0W.