So I have this laptop that just crapped its pants one day. I'm thinking me tinkering with GVT-g/d fucked something up (a reboot after messing with it yielded mobo failure codes), however after a year (!) of it being off, it sprung to life twice for me to update the BIOS and access it... and now it just doesn't even spit out codes. It just fails to come up.
I'm no electrical engineer but I see some coils have no voltage (especially one related to USB power? maybe?) which leads me to believe -
that the EC failed. This computer did always have its quirks with devices, like that one time the SD card caused Windows to spit out like 100 device errors per second and slowed it down to a crawl.
All this to say I just bought an EC and 5 BIOS chips to see if I can bring it back to life, for the lulz.
If I do bring it back I'm seriously thinking of kitting it out to the max. I'm talking NVMe SSD, FHD IPS Touchscreen, maxxed out RAM and a WI-FI 6E card and using it as a tinkering machine. Installing weird things and trying out new stuff, you know, to feed my brainrot.
Update from the future: I did! 32GB RAM, 1TB NVMe SSD + 2 1TB SATA SSDs, with a flaming new IPS, FHD display and a Wi-Fi 7 (!) card.
I'm gifting this to a friend and shipping it half a continent away. Soon™.
