The Thiccpad

The thiccpad was an impulse purchase. It is a thinkpad T510 that came with 4gbs of RAM. I got told it booted to Bios and that was it. Luckily there was no screen damage. It had the hard drive removed so I put in an SSD and started my linux install. You know linux and thinkpads go together like fish and chips. I chose Linux mint (cinnamon DE) because I actually dont know. It was just on my USB stick.

It wouldn't boot.

To test what was wrong I started pulling out components that didn't need to be there such as the dvd drive and it didn't boot. I thought its always the easiest thing. So I replaced the RAM with known working RAM. Boom it booted. On the thinkpad t510 there in a RAM slot on the back and under the keyboard. The RAM was obviously placed under the keyboard so I had to take it off which was no problem. When I put it back to together the keyboard didnt work. Turns out I didn't plug it back in. I also figured I would repaste it aswell. It was involved... No problem through and it was fun!

It was an NVIDIA optimus dedicated GPU varient. Which was infamous on linux and led to This video from Linux Torvalds (Warning for swearing :)) Mine worked perfectly with the community made Nouveau drivers. Nvidia is getting better since then with their open-source drivers for linux for newer graphics cards (Ampere, Turing, Ada Lovelace and Hopper architectures).

I got into linux and found out the trackpad didn't work so I replaced it and it worked perfectly. It ran youtube videos okay. I watched a movie on it without many frame drops on 720p. I was plesantly surprised that the DVD drive worked.