Notes; Lenovo T400

[Juergen Lock]

In article <20130202161405.F87033 at sola.nimnet.asn.au> you write:
>On Wed, 30 Jan 2013 21:35:36 -0800, Adrian Chadd wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > It turns out my Lenovo T400 issue? It was because in /etc/sysctl.conf
> > I had this:
> > 
> > # hw.acpi.reset_video=1
> > 
> > .. don't do that.
>
>Took some hunting to find your original Nov 27 post, boiled down to:
>
> > The resume results in a blank screen - whatever happens causes the
> > video to not fully recover..
>
>So may we assume your T400 now resumes properly?  Reason I'm interested 
>is having last week stripped a friend's T500 almost completely down to 
>replace its snapped left LCD hinge - not an uncommonly reported problem 
>with T500s, not so much T400s, on various fora including Lenovo and 
>Thinkwiki - and I might get to inherit this one when she upgrades.
>
>A few observations from two long nights in the bowels of the beast:
>
>Construction quality, compared with my several IBM T23s, is crap.  The 
>broken hinge problem exemplifies that; I loosened the tension on the 
>supposedly genuine but even tinnier-looking replacement hinge to 
>hopefully mitigate a repeat, but even so I've advised her to open and 
>close it gingerly and then as infrequently as is practical.
>
>The service manual still looks and smells like an IBM manual, but is 
>inaccurate in several respects.  All of the supposedly nylon-covered 
>screws were in fact standard screws with a dab of Loctite; I only 
>bothered with a very light grade of Loctite on significant screws like 
>the heatpipe to CPU/GPU/fan attachment and the hinge-to-frame screws.
>
>The old remedy of blowing out heatsinks with a can of compressed air 
>only works after removing the heatpipes to the fan and heatsink, which 
>is a very finely-spaced grill on the fan output side, which was almost 
>100% clogged after 2 years, and blowing air INTO it from outside would 
>only have distributed the muck around inside, ready to re-clog the 
>outlet.  No obvious air inlets, either.
>
>Yes, the heatsink compound was solidified and not well done originally. 
>The heatpipe to the video chips (one Nvidia, one Intel) was different to 
>the manual, but I may have googled up an older version.  I used what 
>should be a good grade of silver HS compound and it now runs SO much 
>cooler, but these things are expected to be running hot anyway!:
>hw.acpi.thermal.tz0._PSV: 105.0C
>hw.acpi.thermal.tz0._HOT: -1
>hw.acpi.thermal.tz0._CRT: 110.0C
>
>My friend is a fast touch typist, and has managed to wear the markings 
>off half a dozen keycaps in just over two years, unlike old Thinkpads.
>This doesn't bother her, but a hunt-n-pecker like me has to think :)
>
>Care to comment on what works on yours, and what doesn't?
>
>I have to assume you've got wireless going :)  What card? Are there any 
>issues with BIOS blacklists for wireless cards?

I _think_ all Lenovos have bios whitelists for wifi cards.

>  This one came with:
>iwn0: <Intel WiFi Link 5100> mem 0xfd6fe000-0xfd6fffff irq 17 at device 0.0 on pci3
>
>I booted it from an i386 9.1-RELEASE disc1 and have a normal and verbose 
>dmesg and sysctls dev.cpu and hw.acpi if anyone's interested, though of 
>course all the HDA logging has chopped off the head of the verbose dmesg 
>with its standard 64K buffersize (61753 bytes recorded) - grrr!
>
 Btw you should be able to set kern.msgbufsize to something bigger
from the loader prompt...

>cheers, Ian

 HTH,
	Juergen