[ltp] Thinkpad Hardware Maintenance Diskette

[John Morris]

On Wed, 25 Apr 2001, James Hawtin wrote:

> I wonder if the disk would work for other models, if so, several people
> have had motherboards replaced unnecessarily, I wonder if they could claim
> the money back from IBM if that is the case.

Well the serice manual for my TP570E told me what to do to fix it.  Since
the service manuals for most(all?) Thinkpads are online it would be fairly
easy for folks to check it out.  Look in the section of the manual where
they explain how to replace the major components and they explain using
the Thinkpad Hardware Maintenance Diskette to put the original serial
number back in after a board swap.

And just my guess, yes it will work for most/all of the Thinkpads which
have been hosed by this silliness and yes customers should be hopping mad
at idiot service techs & support drones who can't/won't RTFM.

Then we should be mad at the designers at IBM who put a rewritable device
into the machine to hold a serial number!  It should have been a write
once and then lock sort of chip or just a ROM.  Every notebook maker likes
to TALK about anti-theft measures in their sales brochures but I haven't
found one yet that really did it right. They might stop the casual idiot
thief, but the clever ones find the utilities and reprogram serial
numbers, remove boot passwords, etc because the companies always leave a
backdoor and think their own service techs will be the only ones who will
ever know about it.  And it isn't just laptops, it's pagers and cell
phones as well.

--
John M.      http://www.beau.org/~jmorris        This post is 100% M$ Free!
Geek code 3.0:GCS C+++ UL++++$ P++ L+++ W++ N++ w--- Y+ 5+++ R tv- b++ e* r


----- The Linux ThinkPad mailing list -----
The linux-thinkpad mailing list home page is at:
http://www.bm-soft.com/~bm/tp_mailing.html