I bought an $87 Ryzen ThinkPad.. what went wrong?!!!?!

Hey, welcome back to another video on the channel. Today we look at this ThinkPad X13 I bought for only $87, what went wrong? This deal was too good to be true, let's see what the issues are and if I can fix them. Also, if AMD Ryzen ThinkPad's are valid.
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CHAPTERS:
00:00 - Intro
00:33 - The ThinkPad X13
00:50 - Unboxing
01:08 - Overview
01:25 - Issue No. 1
01:40 - Issue No. 2
02:22 - Dispute
03:18 - Testing
04:08 - Performance
04:18 - Minecraft
04:35 - CounterStrike 2
04:49 - Conclusion

[@Duraputer]

That's disappointing, sometimes sellers miss things in the description. A few times I've had a bios lock I've actually been able to guess the password. I try *blank* ,1234,password. On my x201 was not so lucky. I could have returned it, but it was is such good condition i decided to keep it, and i was able to unlock it by jumping two pins on the bios chip.

[@cephacore]

Forgot to mention this, the seller shows the BIOS page in the listing so they must've known but never mentioned it. Shady stuff. .. On the older ThinkPad's (xx40-xx80) you can bypass the BIOS password via CH341 programmer with Badcaps Lenovo AutoPatcher . Might try it in a later vid. BTW love your vids, keep em coming 👍

[@paitonVR]

i got lucky with my t470. i got it for $20 usd and had nothing wrong with it. all i did was upgrade the ram to 16gb and now i use it for random projects i do.

[@cephacore]

damn that's very lucky. nice find 👌

[@jakeparkinson8929]

I think its bad luck, I got an a285 for £100 and it was absolute fine! Honestly, I brought it on ebay from a sponsored seller, it looked sketchy af but the laptop came and it was totally fine. I love it.

[@cephacore]

That's great to hear, the A series ThinkPads are quite cool tbh

[@24kings57]

Beautiful

[@indask8]

You should also check if computrace (or other anti theft tool) is enabled in the BIOS, if enabled+activated the laptop can be tracked by the company who owned it. 2:18 should be in Security/Absolute Persistence Module.

[@cephacore]

I checked, it says Enabled but not active. So at some point it must've been. Unfortunately it doesn't resolve the bios lock

[@otodev3762]

What a shame, that laptop looked like an excellent project. I bought a thinkpad a485 for 200 dollars with a charger included, more or less, I bought it because it was in better condition than the old one I had (the poor thing was falling apart, I had had it for a few years already) The chassis is a little broken and somewhat bent, but otherwise it is wonderful; a ryzen 5 2500 pro with 16 gb ram and 256 gb disk. It is a good PC for developers, which is what I work on, the disk is filling up but I will soon buy a 500 GB one to replace it

[@cephacore]

Completely forgot they made those, the A series thinkpads are quite cool. Might make a vid on one 😄

[@kmgshop1570]

Bro i bought 10$ thinkpad with single core processor which now become my daily driver

[@cephacore]

Wow that's cool, surprised how a single core CPU can run these days. Nice

[@kingmonkey88]

A lot of these Thinkpads on ebay are ex company, so have bios locked. Some of them have had a hard life and are not worth it. But every now and again you can find a good one.

[@cephacore]

Yep I get that, it was the seller's responsibility to inform that beforehand.

[@siontheodorus1501]

Since it has bios lock, how are you able to go into the bios?

[@cephacore]

you can view the bios by enter. you just can't change any settings

[@vijinho]

I returned 2 laptops in the past few weeks for the same reason, BIOS lock. eBay and Cash Converters. A third return because a RAM slot was dodgy... Luck of the draw. However I got a great L480 which makes a great Hackintosh and upgraded to wifi 6e ax210ngf with 32gb.

[@cephacore]

Hate it when sellers don't disclose full details. It's almost like they try to hide it from less experienced buyers hoping they never notice. eBay is prolific for this.

[@vijinho]

@@cephacore Yes. These secure permanent BIOS passwords are a real PITA with laptops where removing the CMOS battery does nothing and contribute to unnecessary e-waste. OK sure they are usually fine if you can just reinstall windows but any fine tuning or for other OS is a no-go.

[@Sugarhil1Adot]

Would love to see you upgrade a old socketed or not laptop and see how it can perfrom in todays world and see if its usable or not. 🙂

[@cephacore]

Great idea. I'll have a look to see if I can do that 👌

[@JessicaFEREM]

the fact that lenovo still ships TN panels of such low quality in their laptops is shameful I DON'T CARE if it's a budget variant, there's no reason to ship such a crap screen in such an expensive laptop. the macbook air M1 is $600 there's no excuse.

[@cephacore]

Exactly, although I think they've stopped it with their newer laptops. Still, for such an expensive laptop a TN panel is mad.. it was almost unusable in certain cases.

[@darkkingmina4487]

i would try to fix the bios lock somehow and change the whole body and display

[@cephacore]

Would love to know how, ik with the older thinkpads it's much easier to remove the bios lock.

[@thebyzocker]

@@cephacore iirc you need to flash the bios with the newer ones