[GTALUG] Repair & Replace

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Peter King via talk <talk at gtalug.org>
| 
| It's a Lenovo Legion T5-26AMRS, about a year and a half old; the CPU is an AMD
| Ryzen 7 5700G (8 cores) running around 3GHz, with 32GB of RAM.  The graphics
| card is an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 with 12GB onboard RAM.

Quick partial response:

Does you machine expose ports for the iGPU of the 5700G?  If so, you could 
use the iGPU and remove the NVidia card.

Why?

- the iGPU is decent and should work for the things you do

- the AMD iGPU is supported by open-source drivers
  (The nouveau drivers are not very good for modern NVidia cards.
  For one thing, they cannot control the power levels (this may have 
  changed.))

This will reduce the complexity of your system.  There is a slight chance 
that it will fix your problem.  Bonus: power usage will go down

|  I bought a
| three-year warranty when I got it, so it's still eligible for repair. 
| Ignoring the CPU Fan Failure message so far hasn't caused any hiccups, which
| makes me distrust the message.  The fact that the CMOS started acting up
| exactly when the fans failed make me suspect an electrical problem on the
| motherboard.

Lenovo phone support *might* be useful.  It sure is easier than shipping 
your box to them.

Where is the Fan Failure message coming from?  Firmware or Linux?
If it is coming from the firmware, they don't have to know you have Linux.

Where is the CMOS message coming from?  Firmware or Linux?
If it is coming from the firmware, they don't have to know you have Linux.

There area also official lenovo fora.  Mostly for users but some Lenovo 
support people lurk there and sometimes post.  On balance, not wonderful 
but sometimes helpful.

| I run Arch Linux; I wiped Windows off the machine as soon as I got it.

Now you know: lack of Windows makes support more difficult.  In your case, 
we think that it is a hardware/firmware problem so it should not matter.  
But support folks may be hard to convince.

If you actually return a box to Lenovo, they sometimes allow you to keep 
the disk drive (for security/privacy reasons).  They may charge a fee for 
this.

That's why I sometimes buy boxes with the smallest drive, and then swap it 
out to sit on a shelf as my insurance policy.  That's why William puts 
Linux on an added disk.

| There seems to be a CLI tool called something like fwupdate that works at
| least on some ThinkPads.  It might work on the Legion tower, too, but then
| again it might not.

fwupdmgr will know if it understands your computer.  It should be safe to 
run it but I think that it is unlikely to work.  It depends on the 
manufacturer supplying fwupd.org with suitable binaries.  Lenovo probably 
doesn't do that for model that don't support Linux (my guess).

This appears to be the update.  The readme confuses me.  It doesn't seem 
to say what the improvements are.  It does say that there are some 
challenges updating from a version older than O4MKT1CA.  What firmware are 
you running ("sudo dmidecode | grep 'BIOS Rev'" might tell you).

Note: there may be other kinds of firmware distributed by Lenovo via 
Windows Update or Lenovo Vantage (running only on Windows).  For example, 
disk drive firmware.  Such updates might improve behaviour under Linux.

|  I bought this machine hoping for a long-lasting workhorse
| and it has given me far more trouble than my off-the-shelf computers where I
| matched the components by myself.  Such is life.

Normally, this Lenovo box is called "off the shelf".  Boxes were you 
select the parts had have them assembled are called custom builds, but the 
components themselves are "off the shelf".

I'm not sure that buying a gaming computer is the best route to stability.  
It should be OK.

| But having had it once not-really-fixed by Lenovo, at some effort, I don't
| know that I want to go down that road again rather than cutting out (what
| might be) the problem at its roots...

The more you touch of the problem, the more you own of it.

My suggestion is to get Lenovo to fix it, or write it off.  Anything else 
is a rabbit hole of unknown depth.

First step down the rabbit hole (I would do this, but I don't really 
recommend it because of the work involved): install Windows (probably on a 
different disk).  See if the problem goes away.  Do the firmware update.  
See if the problem goes away.  At this point, you are in a position 
where Lenovo support will not be distracted by Linux and use it as an 
excuse.