Projects
Project development was slow this week though I finally picked back up on writing these blog posts.
Personal
Following significant medicational differences within the last two weeks, a lot has changed about myself, mostly for the better.
2nd Life Inc.
I enter my second week of the return to 2nd Life Inc. where I continue to work on interesting and not so interesting hardware. A lot of this is going to be me obsessively writing about LCD screens and computer chips.
Day 4 - July 16
On this day, I finally went back to the type of computer that was practically in front of me for the majority of my short work period between March and April 2023: the iMac. Interestingly enough, the units we worked on were 2019 models. Unlike my 2023 work, these units already had RAM and storage so I did not have to take them apart and all I had to do was clear the drives, rebuild the Fusion Drive config and reinstall macOS.
Day 5 - July 17
I started the day with the usual desktop PC inspections.
Dell OptiPlex GX520
One PC that I found interesting, being the first Pentium 4 I touched in years, a Dell OptiPlex GX520 tower. I had to get Lubuntu 18.04 32-bit back onto a USB which I know works well on Pentium 4, in order to clear the HDD partitions and get specifications. The system did have some sort of graphics card, due to the lack of PCIe on the motherboard, a PCI graphics card (more like video adapter) was installed. It was interesting in that it had four Qimonda 128 Mbit DDR ICs from Week 10, 2009 and were diffused in Sandston, Virginia (has WVV- code) while the graphics card was assembled much further into 2009, past the closure of the Sandston, Virginia plant. Fitting, the RAM installed were two 512MB Infineon DDR modules though supposedly made in Germany.
Scrap Sorting
Being more of a recent thing being done by 2nd Life Inc, this was the first time I have done this. On Thursdays, we look through the scrap pallets in the back, sorting out parts.
First, we sorted a bin of laptop parts, sorting out LCD panels, RAM, SSDs (very important) and motherboards. I found multiple Sharp LQ140M1J62 and Innolux N140HCA-EAC panels in the bin, unfortunately all smashed. After laptop parts were sorted, we started to sort out laptop replacement parts from boxes. I set all of the known-good LCD panels aside, so they do not get scrapped, which is effectively throwing them away. I was only able to find one AAS panel, an N156HCA-E5A, the rest were mostly BOE and AUO TN panels.
Day 6 - July 18
This was definitely a day not like any other.
Dell Precision 5720
These were rather interesting systems. Supposedly from the EDID data I got off from one of them I worked on, these systems had 27" 4K IGZO LCD panels from Sharp. These panels looked absolutely beautiful and were nothing like I have seen before. Another thing I did not realize until a couple days later is that these systems could be upgraded to Intel Xeon CPUs and supposedly be able to make use of ECC (error-correcting code) memory, just like the HP Z240 SFF desktop I use on the workbench.
Unfortunately, these systems lack a VESA mount which makes them much more difficult to wall-mount.
Lenovo ThinkCentre and speeding up inspections
I came up with multiple methods to speed up the process of inspecting and clearing drive partitions. I noticed that from a Live USB, Ubuntu boots very slowly and a lot of time is wasted just staring at the Ubuntu loading screen. After trying to use Puppy Linux then Tiny Core Linux which failed miserably, I decided to use Alpine Linux without a graphical interface which booted so much faster.
I started to use the Flipper Zero's BadUSB capabilities to automate the typing of commands, importantly dd which is unforgiving of mistakes. I have the script do this: - lscpu | grep Intel (switch to AMD if I am working on AMD units) - Get CPU model - free -h - List RAM size - dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/nvme0n1 bs=512 count=512 && sync - clear partition table and ensure changes are written, nvme0n1 can be switched to whatever the internal drive is expected to be named
It does all of that within one to three seconds, combined with Alpine's faster boot speeds, this significantly speeds up the process of inspection. However, due to Secure Boot being enabled, don't get me started on Secure Boot, I have to disable it in the BIOS on every unit in order for Alpine to boot. The amount of time saved by Alpine's boot time more than enough offsets the time it takes to disable Secure Boot in the BIOS menu.
From all of this, I managed to inspect 21 Lenovo ThinkCentre systems within a 2.5 hour period. Since some of the time was spent trying to get Puppy or Core to boot, I could do future units much faster as this method is now established.