Episode: 4661
Title: Laptop Computer Woes, or How I Learned to Love My Tech Hoarding
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4661/hpr4661.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:16:10 (official HPR transcript)

---

This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4661, for 2026-06-15
Today's show is entitled, "Laptop Computer Woes, or How I Learned to Love My Tech Hoarding"
The host is Claudio Miranda and the duration is 00:26:10
The flag is Clean, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "Claudio rambles on about problems with his two laptops and how his tech hoarding came to the rescue."
Hey, Hacker Public Radio, this is Claudio M. And on this episode, I'm going to talk to you about some issues that I have with my two main laptops that I use on a daily basis.
One more so than the other. My main laptop, my daily driver, is as you all know, those of you who follow me on my BSD.network, MasterDonicount.
I have what's branded as an EVO EVC141-12, that's the model number.
laptop, it's the Elite 14-inch, the layman's term, the name for it.
And it is sold, it was sold by Walmart, came out in 2020, comes with a Ryzen 5-3500 view, the Radion Vega 8 graphics, I believe it is.
It's not a bad laptop. It has some issues, as I said, some cons, it's only got one ramp slot on it, so a single channel memory.
But otherwise, it wasn't a bad laptop, didn't be well.
And then the other is my older, which I call my workforce, really, the HP ProBook 4540S.
This one has a Core i53320M, it's got eight gigs of RAM, and it has actually dual graphics. It has the Intel HD 4000 integrated graphics,
and the Radion HD7650 graphics.
So, when that one was sold to me, I don't think they realized that it actually had two graphics, but the sticker on it said otherwise, there was a radion sticker on this.
So, I had asked the seller about it, and he said, nope, just the one that shows in device manager, because it was running, it had a hard drive that was running Windows 10 at the time.
But when I got it, I actually did a test on it, booted up in Linux, and it did show that it had also a radion HD7650.
So, that was a good thing for me, and that I actually purchased before the, but both of them were starting to give me some problems as a link.
And unfortunately, the AMD one, the EVU, was having issues with the power, where it would have difficulty charging.
And that was with the original charger some time ago, and I was like, well, maybe it's a charger.
So, I went ahead and I replaced it with another one that I had for a while now, and I found a connector that worked with it, and that met the power requirements for the laptop.
And it worked fine with that for a good while, and then that one started out problem.
And so, I started testing with a few others, checking to make sure that that wasn't overloading the circuit.
And it worked for a little bit, and then it finally gave up to go.
I just turned off, I would not turn on at all, neither from the battery, neither from the AC port.
So, I decided to open this up, and to my dismay, I see that one of the two capacitors that is for the power, it's just completely destroyed.
So, it was damaged, not sure why, but well, I probably overloaded who knows, might have been my fault.
But yeah, so that one's dead.
And then I'm like, okay, well, I have to see what I can do about that one, but I'll talk about that one in a minute, I'm just going to give you a little brief.
Some brief summary of the HP, the Pro Book.
That one I use usually at work, or when the other one's charging, when the evil is charging, I would use the Pro Book, which is running Fedora.
The evil is running OpenBSD.
So, the Pro Book actually was starting to show some problems with the screen, it would start to glitch out whenever I moved the LCD screen.
It would glitch out and flash a bright white on the screen intermittently as I moved it.
So, it seemed like it was an issue with a connection of some sort, but it just got progressively worse.
So, it got to the point where it really started becoming an issue when I was using it, and it was frustrating.
So, going back to the evil, I said, okay, well, I don't have the capability or the equipment to be able to perform this, this solder job, because the factors that are used in spaces C8 and C16, C16 being the one that actually blew out.
There's surface mount capacitors, and you kind of have to have a certain equipment for that to do some micro-sodering, and I don't have it.
However, my eldest son, who is studying Electrical Engineering, and his grandfather, who is an Electrical Engineering, they both have experience with this.
And so, I reached out to them to see if they can actually fix this for me, and they said it shouldn't be a problem.
It's possible that his grandfather will be able to do the job.
So, but all they needed was the schematics on the laptop, so it's okay, great.
Let me go do a search on Google, and on Dr. Go, and on Ecosia, and on every search engine that I can think of, and none of them came up with the schematics for this evil laptop.
Now, the main board does have a stick around it with a serial number or a part number, and it shows as a long string of letters and numbers.
I'm not going to read it out here.
It is actually, I have a blog post about this, which I'll be posting in the show notes, and it has all the links to everything that I'll be talking about today.
So, I couldn't find anything with that whole jumble of alpha numerics.
But I did notice when I started doing some searches that part of the beginning of that part number was give me some hits.
So, I ended up finding some information on what is the PF4, PU1F.
Now, there's a number of laptops that are based on this, and the reason that is the case is because this laptop, as well as those other ones listed on the search,
are made by Clevo. Clevo is a Taiwanese company that makes manufacturers generic laptops, and sells them three sellers who they rebrand it,
and they sell them in different names like EVU or Motile or X&G or whatever, and I think there are some Linux based,
the ones that come with Linux pre-installed, that actually use Clevo as their model.
So, I did, after doing a search with just the PF4, P1F, I did come across schematics for the tongue-fang brand of laptops, and most of them seem to fit the design of what my EVU is.
So, I started looking, I found a site that had the, that had the PDF files of the schematics for various, for variations of this device,
and I noticed that all of them had the same under the DC and entry. They had the same markings for the capacitors for C and C16,
and that was one U-25, that 06R-K. So, I took that information, and I sent it to my son, and he says he believes that kind of identifies what,
what the specs of the, of the, of the surface mount capacitor is, but he's not quite sure. So, I sent him all the files,
and I told him to give it to his grandfather, and we'll see when, you know, if they're able to find it, and be able to repair it for me.
So, at least I have somewhat of a solution, but it's not a quick solution, meaning I am without that laptop for now, and my OpenBSD system is unusable.
So, I decided to pull everything out, I pulled out the SSD that, and not to SSD, which was running OpenBSD. The SSD, the SAT SSD that came with a laptop that's running Windows,
that came with Windows 10, now to running 11, because I've rid it, and the RAM.
And I decided to plug in my subrent external USB external SSD and H hard drive rally, spending hard drive, docking station, to the, to the, to the pro book.
And I was able to boot up off of the M.2 SSD, because the dock has a slot for that, and I was able to perform a snapshot update on the installed OpenBSD system on that SSD.
Which is great, because if I need to keep it up to date, I can do so that way. If I need access to my files, I can access that way it's bootable through the USB port, which is great. That works for me, that's a partial solution.
I was trying, I may eventually look at getting a Lenovo, much newer Lenovo, probably a Gen5 or Gen64 team in the base, but we'll see. If I don't have to spend money, I won't, if they can fix it, I'll stay with this one for a while until things get better.
But on that topic, yeah, so I was able to get my files, but like I said, this laptop was starting to have some issues, so I needed to dive into the pro book and see what was wrong with it.
Like I said, this screen, whenever you move the LCD cover, towards the closed or open position, it would just completely glitch out, flicker, and it would just be a problem.
Very distracting, very frustrating to work with that, because even when it got to the point where even without moving it, it would start doing that.
So I took it to work, wow, I always taken it to work with me, but I said, let me go ahead and open this up and see what I can do.
Now, I did plan to upgrade the screen on this from the 13666.768 resolution LCD that it has to something like a 1920 by 1080.
I wasn't sure if it could be done, but I did come across a blog post, not a blog post, I'm sorry, forum post on 20 Mac x86, which is a forum for hackintosh enthusiasts.
And they have a post regarding the 4540s LCD screen and replacing the 1080p on it.
Now, the reason why this is possible is because the 4000 series has, they're basically the same design, just different processors.
And there is the 4540s, which is what I have, there's also the 4440s, which is this in this blog, that also uses the same LCD display from LG.
And the LVDS cable part number is, well, not the same one, they're off by a couple of it, but nothing the same.
You have to excuse that I'm here work in recording here at work, so the dismissal about just went off.
But anyway, there's also the 4740, that one comes with a Core i7 CPU, and that one actually has a 1080p option.
And I believe there are some 4540s that do also have the 1080p option.
But what you need is a dual link LVDS cable in order to make a work.
So there is a possibility of me upgrading this down the road.
But right now, just like I said, I can't even replace this, that evil laptop, so I am, there's no way I'm going to be able to replace a screen.
So I have everything safe for when it's possible to do so.
But for now, I just wanted to see if I can get in there and figure out what's causing this.
And see if maybe I can fix it, something that I can fix easily.
So I found also a video that takes this same model, 4540s Probook.
And the person in the video is actually replacing the screen and doing the 1080p upgrade on it.
Which is great because when they come, come the time that I have to actually upgrade the screen, I can do so with a video.
But he does a great job of just going through the entire countdown of the device.
So what to expect, where to loosen things, where the screws are, everything, because some of the screws are well hidden, you wouldn't think that would be there.
Very important. So I just want to make sure I didn't damage this Probook.
I was able to tear it down. I was able to loosen the screen from the back case of the LCD cover.
And now there is a ribbon cable that runs to the screen from the inside of the computer to the back of the screen, back of the LCD screen.
And that is a very delicate cable.
So I did my best to just re-seat that cable. It has a little lever that you really have to lift very carefully without tearing anything.
It's funny because there is a piece of plastic in the back with red letters that says, do not touch in double what's connection points.
And yeah, they were going to stop me because I needed to fix this.
I went ahead and I carefully and gently disconnected the LVDS cable and placed the back end just receded it.
And once I had that all set, I said, okay, let me go ahead and connect this to power.
And just to make sure that the screen still turns out. And it does.
Screen turned on and I said, let me go ahead and move the LCD screen.
And let me move the hinges and see if it starts doing the same thing.
And thankfully, I was successful in resolving that issue.
So the screen, I had to put everything back the bezel back in everything.
So I was able to move it without energy, anything and inside.
And as I moved the LCD screen,
I wasn't having that issue anymore.
The screen was still viewable and it was still stable, no flickering, no glitching, nothing at all.
And I tested it a bunch of times all the way almost closed before the this.
It will go into sleep mode.
And all the way, you know, just to the extremes as much as I could.
And it was fine. It was fine. It was like a brand new laptop.
So I was very happy with that.
That I didn't have to actually spend money on a replacement screen.
Be it the 1366 by 768 or the upgrade.
I can actually wait on the upgrade.
So I went ahead and I started closing it up.
But I did notice as I was about to put the hinge covers back on.
That one of the Wi-Fi antenna cables was severed.
And this is what I find to be a defect on this laptop.
Everything is great about this laptop.
It is actually very user serviceable, the 4540.
And all the other models similar to it.
There's some that actually have a socket CPU like this one.
This one I can actually replace the CPU if I was.
But some haven't soldered in, but this one thankfully is socketed.
So I can upgrade it to a Core i7 if I wanted to.
But for now the Core i5 is fine.
So I saw that and I tried to see if I can use that kind of tucked it in.
The second cable both of the cables really were in bad condition.
But the the one for the right side.
That was going towards the right side of the LCD cover.
On the inside was completely severed.
So I said let me see if I can use it.
This was on a Friday.
Let me see if I can use it over the weekend.
As is.
It was a miserable experience because I had to be very close to the access point to get any connection.
I couldn't be outside like I usually am.
Like if I decided I wanted to be outside.
Grilling and have my laptop while I was grilling.
Not possible.
So I said all right.
I'm going to have to search eBay and see if I can find the replacement.
Wi-Fi antenna cables for this.
But then I remembered.
I actually have another 454.
Yes.
It was my previous one, which this one had a Core i3.
It was the first one that I got about 10 years ago.
It was a, I purchased it from an acquaintance from then.
And it only has a Core i3.
It has a Core i3.
It has a Core i3.
3110N.
This probe, the dual graphics one, is Core i5.
3320N.
And it all, and the Core i3 one only has the Intel graphics.
But other than that, all the components are pretty much the same.
So I set to myself if I can open this older one up.
And the Wi-Fi antenna on in this laptop is in good condition.
I can replace it with that, and I don't have to purchase anything.
So I decided on Monday to take both probe books with me.
And I started tearing them both down using the video that I had down a little bit.
Toward down the Core i3 probe book and removed the Wi-Fi antenna cables.
Which thankfully were in great condition.
They were not damaged.
However, there's an issue with this screen.
Why stop the reason why stop using is that there was also an issue with the screen.
Which I also blame on the hinge covers.
The hinge covers are the defect in my opinion because they are very sharp.
Very sharp.
And trying to get them out and put them back in is very difficult.
So there is the possibility of causing damage to the cables because of how sharp they are.
Especially those very thin, delicate Wi-Fi antenna cables.
But I do believe the wear and tear of opening and closing the screen may have caused some damage to the NLVDS cable for the LCD screen on the i3 probe.
It just stopped displaying.
But one of the things I didn't notice when I put it back together after I removed the Wi-Fi antenna cables from it was that the backlight on the screen stopped working.
So the screen still works just the backlight doesn't work.
However, I don't know if that hinge caused damage that would have affected the backlight on the screen.
So the only way to test would be to do the 1080p replacement on the i5 probe and then put the screen, the old screen from the i5 to the i3 probe.
So that might be a future HDR episode.
So we'll see about that.
But anyway, back to the top again hand.
I went ahead and I was able to remove the Wi-Fi antenna cables from the i3 probe.
And I proceeded to feed them through the i5 probe.
Remove the old ones, put in the replacement ones.
But this time, I said let me be, let me be intelligent about this.
Because of how dangerous it is to sever those little cables.
I'm going to put some layer of protection around those cables by the hinge area.
So I decided to cut off a piece of the sheath of a cat 5 ethernet cable.
One that was flexible enough to be able to fit in there and be able to close it up.
And then not have it interfere with the opening and closing of the screen.
So I did that. I fed it through.
And it looks to have done the job.
So it has that extra layer of protection.
I was able to put the hinge cover in without a problem.
Everything closed up properly.
And I ran the rest of the rest of the antenna through through the path that it goes to to lead up to the wireless card.
And got it connected.
Close everything back up.
And decided to test booted up into store.
Check the network, the network icon on KDE plasma.
And connected to the Wi-Fi here at my work.
And all was good.
Wireless is working perfectly.
It had a very strong signal.
So I basically repaired this laptop.
I think that I haven't spent any bit of money.
And thanks to my tech hoarding, which I'm very grateful for.
And I think you should learn to love your tech hoarding.
Because as I put in my blog,
you never know when it might come in handy to paraphrase mobile.
It's done me a lot of good to have that replacement or hold on to it for so long.
That previous IP version of the pro look.
And I'm going to continue to hold on to it because there are other parts that I may need to use from it as well.
So there's a reason to always, to never throw away at your old tech.
All right.
Let's make things sustainable.
Let's try and make them less as long as they can and prevent e-waste.
So I now have a working fully functional pro book 4540S with the dual graphics.
And the screen is working wonderfully.
Wi-Fi is working wonderfully.
But I do hope that either my son or his grandfather can repair the power on the evil laptop.
So I can use that.
If not, I'll have to look at purchasing a newer laptop.
And as I mentioned, it would be a ThinkPad T14 Gen5 or Gen6.
Don't remember which one it was, but that'd be sizable.
So yeah, that's my story.
That's my story of how in spite of the laptop walls that I had.
I learned to love my tech hoarding because I was able to repair.
My current one was some old stuff.
And that's great.
So I think you should keep that in mind.
Keep your stuff.
And be sure to share stories like this if you have them.
Or anything that's of interest to hackers.
Be sure to share it in an episode to hacker public radio because we always need shows.
This will be my first one for this year, 2026.
I'm recording this on May 22nd of 2026.
So this will come out maybe a few weeks later in the feed.
So just putting a date on this right now.
It could go into the reserve queue, but I have some other things.
I want to put the reserve key for that.
But I figured I put this out now.
So Ken, I've met my requirement of one show for the year.
But there will be more to come.
Anyway, thanks everyone for listening.
This has been Claudio M.
And tune in tomorrow for another exciting episode of hacker public radio.
You have been listening to the Hacker Public Radio podcast, at hackerpublicradio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast, then visit the HPR site to find out how easy it really is.
Hosting for HPR has been kindly provided by anhonesthost.com, the Internet Archive, rsync.net, and the HPR Community Content Delivery Network.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license.
