[GTALUG] thinkpad repair; or, new laptop

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, Sep 01, 2016 at 02:52:20PM -0400, Matt Price via talk wrote:
> My THinkpad T440s is having some serious issues with suspend -- at times it
> will enter a hard freeze while suspended, requiring a hard reset with the
> manual reset button; at times it won't suspend at all, but enter a
> similarly unresponsive, blank-screen state from which it cannot be
> accessesd, requiring a soft reset with the power button; and at other times
> it will suspend just fine.
> 
> 1) I suppose this could be at least partly a software problem. Anyone know
> what logs I should look in? I'm running Gnome on Arch, so it's a systemd
> system.

Well it could be a software problem.  Suspend/resume handling has often
been a problem.  So many drivers and things involved and easy to have
something not work quite right.  I never use it (Partially because it
takes less time to boot and start my programs than to resume with a lot
of ram in the machine).

> 2) I suspect this is atl east partly a hardware problem. My warranty is
> expired. Is there a decent thinkpad repair place that might be able to
> diagnose this issue?

No clue, and at what cost?

> 3) if I can't fix this, I will be getting a new laptop shortly. It would be
> nice if I could use my new m2 drive (which is currently in an LVM together
> with the primary SSD from the thinkpad, but I'd hate to lose it entirely as
> it wasn't cheap). The Thinkpad T460 looks like it will end up costing about
> $2000. I'd like to get a linux-compatible machine with a nice keyboard, but
> pay a bit less than that if I can (it's only been a couple of years since I
> bought the last one!). Any suggestions? THe keyboard has always been the
> killer feature that keeps me with Thinkpad, but maybe things have gotten
> better in the last little while?

My wife's T430 recently stopped turning on.  Our current plan is to find
a similar model on kijiji for about $350 and get that, then move over
the disks, and ram and such that we added.  At least that way we get to
keep our upgraded hardware and we will have an extra battery, keyboard,
power adapter, etc which is handy.

-- 
Len Sorensen