Lenovo L420 ThinkPad

A Lenovo branded ThinkPad, this was a recent donation, it didn't come with a charger so it is untested, and I'm not sure of the specs until I get a power supply



Top and bottom



Right side, Two USB 2.0, SD card slot, optical drive, and power. The aeroplane mode switch is to the left of the SD card slot
Left side, VGA, Ethernet, eSATA, and a DisplayPort, headphone, and PCMCIA



Back, USB2.0 but always powered, even when the laptop is off
Front, Status LED's



There is a finger print reader next to the keyboard, and the stickers suggest an Intel Core i5 processor and Windows 7


Power supply update

I managed to find a PSU on Ebay for not much, so took a gamble and it worked, the Laptop had been downgraded to Windows XP but needed login credentials which I didn't have, but no issue as I use Ubuntu anyway

However I could not get a live disk image of Ubuntu to boot although I could get a live disc of Linux Mint to boot if I used compatibility mode, but I'm used to Ubuntu

Ubuntu would show GRUB, then hang with a flashing cursor even if you used safe graphics mode. Through lots of internet searching saying try this and type that it looked like the laptop needed a BIOS update

On the Lenovo site the BIOS upgrade files are Windows only, but there is a bootable ISO image for other operating systems, but on writing that to a USB stick the laptop wouldn't recognize it

Turns out you need a programme called geteltorito which is part of the genisoimage package to extract the disc image from the iso, once that was done and and a image file had been generated, then written to a USB stick the laptop BIOS update started, which took A G E S and needed to reboot during the process

Eventually I got Ubuntu 24.04LTS installed and working, and it turns out this laptop is A LOT faster than my current laptop the Lenovo G50-80, so that laptop will be semi-retired and this one used for working away from home instead

This laptop only shipped with 4GB of RAM, so an upgrade will be happening soon, and for some reason my image resizing app of choice XnConvert wouldn't run until a particular command had been run in the terminal, even though it runs fine on both my other laptop and my main desktop



Lastly it took me a little while to find the aeroplane mode switch, it's not obvious


Update

This laptop now has been upgraded to 16GB of RAM and has a 240GB SSD installed with Linux Mint, which makes it really fast and now gets used as my daily, only downsides are the lack of USB3, and I can't pair my bluetooth earpods for some reason


I - FOR without NEXT, 487:1

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