ratdude747

Worked on my lenovo p400. My isue was forgetting the "-bios" option. When my paycheck comes, I may have to chip into your beer fund.

Tried it, the prr2 program worked but the fpt program whined about the CPU not having access to the required region. Any idea on what to do here?

For me, if it's built right, a custom build. That is, good PSU (I hate cheap gutless wonders), dencent case (no razor thin flimsy crap), and decent quality parts. Assembled properly. And this isn't for cost reasons, but for flexabilty reasons. IMHO if you're really saving on cost, either you got a really good deal (like me and free crap from buddies) or you bought cheap junky parts that won't last. Board brand wise, I like supermicro, tyan, MSI, and gigabyte (although intel's boards were also reliable albeit limited in the BIOS out of the box). I really don't like ASUS boards... I've had the worst luck with them. If not custom, say for a less saavy friend, I'd say Dell. I've had great luck with their stuff, both desktop and laptop. Least favorite: HP. Their laptops are reflow magnets and thier desktops are kinda meh for me. I'm also not fond of Lenovo and Acer/Gateway/emachines... They've been hit or miss. At least for me personaly, the issue lenovo seems to have is exterior durability; My Ideapad Touch P400 hasn't held up well (then again, it is consumer crap and not a proper business model (dell latitude, panasonic toughbook, etc.).

Sounds nice (I'd say looks nice too but I can't see the pics (not enough posts)). I have a slight fetish for workstation hardware... my two main rigs both are based on such. Both are older motherboards though (both run DDR); one is based off a supermicro X5DAL-TG2 (twin Xeon gallatin+ HIS ATI HD4670 1gb AGP), the better one is based of a Tyan S2895 Thunder K8WE (twin Opteron x2 Italy + 2x SLI 8600GTs). Both built up reasonably well (and kick ass for productivity) but as you found out, they can sometimes be a PAIN to run right. The worst I've run into was the nicer system's first attempt, a Tyan S2885 K8W. The problem was the damn AMD 8131 AGP to Hyper transport bridge... No linux support. No XP x64 support. No Vista or later support. Basically, no x64 support AT ALL. Try to install GPU drivers, you get a BSOD next bootup. Granted, it was a 1st generation opteron board... but the whole F**king point of opteron WAS x64. Way to F**king ruin a workstation platform, AMD! Due to all the issues, I ended up with two of these no less (both recapped even by yours truly)... both collecting dust (but if I ever score some more EATX cases, I may headless them with some RAGE server GPU's I have sitting). Luckily, the replacement had a kickass Nforce Professional 2000 setup, which runs 7 (and probably linux) beautifully. Twin X16 PCI E's with SLI too... it may be old, but I love the setup... all I need are nicer GPU's and a beefier PSU (as my 600W seasonic isn't enough for better GPU's on top of everything else) and that will rock. Sorry for the long post and long live workstations!

Question: Something odd is happening with my post counts. It says I have 3, yet I'm sure I have 5 approved posts (will be 6 with this one): -1 in new member introductions (I know this one doesn't count) -2 in notebooks -3 in off topic (one is a new thread) Shouldn't that be five posts, not 3? Or is there some posting credit rule I'm not aware of (I skimmed the rules real quick, from what I can find the only non-count is the new member forum). It would be cool if a mod or the like could explain what's going on here.

It's been a pretty lame winter here in the midwestern United States... very cold... the more northern areas got a lot of snow. In the more southern parts where I am, we got hit by ice... Can't wait till spring...

Nothing... but I did score a cheapo OBDII scanner for my wheels for $15 on Cyber monday. Actually, come to think of it, I did get a cheap stainless remington pocket knife for $3 at Gander Mountain the night before Thanksgiving. Not nearly as as nice as my Swiss army knives but better than the beat up Buck it replaced.

Backpack with a hefty laptop sleeve built in. Mainly because I have books for class, papers, and a bevy of accessories/tech toys tossed inside. Heavy as lead, but it's a good workout... The only issue with this is at least for me, the backpack is unstable... it falls over without warning... may be my load configuration, but something to be wary of. I've frequently had it fall off tables an the like (hence they hefty sleeve choice).

Matte is more practical, but glossy looks a lot "sexier" for lack of a better term. I'd therefore say matte when possible. Unless you're gonna sell it soon, in which case, depending on the market, glossy may sell better.

This thread is for posting your most impressive/interesting computer hardware that you use... be it a desktop, laptop, whatever. I'll start with my main-use systems: (I wish I had up to date pics, but I don't at this time) Daily driver college laptop: Lenovo P400 Touch 2.2GHz Core i7 Ivy bridge 8GB DDR3 intel 4000HD graphics 120gb Intel 520 SSD (pending a BIOS mod) intel 7620 A/B/G/N/AC + Bt 4.0 card Dualbooted Windows 7 Home Premium x64 and Arch Linux x64 (Gnome 3) Attempted (not successful) internal USB port mod (tried to tie into the USB on a silkscreened (not installed) PCIe to internal my Logitech Unifying dongle) Logitech M705 Mouse Main desktop/personal workstation: Tyan Thunder K8WE (s2895) Twin Opteron64 X2 Italy 285 (2.6GHz) Stock CPU coolers w/ added PWM fans (swapped from the system below this's coolers) 8GB DDR 400 ECC Twin Nvidia Geforce 8600 GTS, SLI'd LSI/3ware 9500s-4LP RAID card (128MB cache) 4 WD Raptors, 74GB, RAID 0'd twin DVD+RW's (one has lightscribe) Atech XM-5U card reader Ha5ppauge HVR-1600 QAM tuner Supermicro SC732D2-500B case Seasonic 600W PSU twin arctic cooling BB 120mm PWM fans Windows 7 x64 Ultimate Twin Dell 1703FPs LCD's Microsoft Keyboard with fingerprint reader (made to work on x64 using this) Logitech M600 Mouse Second workstation: Supermicro X5DAL-TG2 Twin Xeon Gallatin 3.2GHz Modded (homebrew mounts) HP Coolers, AMD socket 940 stock fans added (swapped from the system above's coolers) 8GB DDR 266 ECC HIS ATI Radeon HD4670 1GB AGP card (AFAIK the nicest AGP card ever made) ASUS Xonar DG Sound card LSI 1394 card (chosen because it has an internal header) WD Blue 320GB HDD Twin DVD+RW's (one has lightscribe) Silver ALPS Floppy drive (you wouldn't know what a PITA silver floppy drives are to find...) Atech pro-28U Silver Card reader Highly modded Atech G4-clone case (Fry's branded): -Dremeled out rear fan area (too restrictive) and PSU hole -Large air intake hole array drilled under HDD area -Modifed Card bracket latchs (to allow dual-slot GPU's) Cooler Master Silentpro 600w (recapped) Windows 7 ultimate x32, with a PAE RAMdisk to utilize all 8GB of RAM (4GB as paging, 800Mb Temp) Twin Acer V173 LCD's Logitech Media Keyboard Microsoft 5 button optical mouse Yes, I have a bit of a workstation fetish... I also have have a stack of Dell Latitude D series laptops... but I think I've posted enough here. So, what hardware do YOU use?

Here's my setup, well, one of many (Win 7 on one of my laptop): http://oi41.tinypic.com/9qk28p.jpg Nothing too special... but from the desktop icons, you can see that I'm not a techo-muggle... half of the fun stuff is for my college classes (I'm a Junior Studying EET), half for modding stuff (android phone, laptop BIOS, etc.). I'd post my other setups but they're either virtually the same (win 7 on my two desktops) or doesn't show much about the setup (Arch linux w/ gnome 3 on my laptops).

Hi. ratdude747 here. I have accounts on a lot of forums... my most frequently used one being badcaps.net forums. I'm here mainly to try to de-whitelist my Lenovo P400, a feat that has been spread amon 1 blog and two other forums... which was fine until the intel flash tool gave the infamous error 28 of doom. There is a thread about that already; once I have my 5 posts (legit ones, being an ex forum mod I've developed an allergy to spamming), I'll give that a spin.