Babe, the laptop assassin

[j2mcgreg]

Well my wonderful cat, Babe, has killed another laptop. This time it was the ProBook and her weapon of choice was a full can of Mandarin Orange sparkiling water knocked over and directly on to the keyboard. After the laptop had dried out for 36 hours I tried booting it up, and I got as far as the log in screen where it died again and now it won’t boot at all. I’ve replaced it with this HP 15:
https://www.staples.ca/products/3029123 ... ws-11-home
which I know to be MX friendly and which I can return unopened within 14 days if the ProBook somehow magically resurects itself.

I did look at buying a refurbed unit instead, but what was available was either really old or within $100.00 of the HP that I purchased and only 5 or 6 years old.

I’m currently using my spare (the Aspire V5), but it has a glossy screen which is really hard on my eyes. I’ll give the Probook another 24 hours of drying time and if it is still dead then, I’ll make the switch. You'll also have to bear with me because the keyboard on this Acer is really awful and there's bound to be lots of spelling mistakes.

[jeffreyC]

Maybe next time try a ThinkPad, they are known for the best laptop keyboards and some of them have drain passages to let liquids spilled into the keyboard flow right on out the bottom.

[Eadwine Rose]

Oh.. is that why they are called thinkpads... they thought about us being human, and our animals being asses

[PeterO]

It might be possible to call the ProBook back to some kind of life again! That sparkling water probably contained some nasty salts, not much but still. Electronics can be cleaned with isopropanol, generous amounts and letting some soak in and then further generous amounts. Let drop off and then dry and see ... The PC has to be opened up as much as possible and HDD removed (probably doesn't like neither sparkling nor isoprop).
Certainly disconnect everything, in particular the power cord before any such operation.

1 liter isoprop should be sufficient, < $10 (there are different grades, top quality is not necessary)
1-2 hours of work

In any case, try to start up the ProBook without HDD (or SDD), just with a live USB stick.

I have saved PC:s, remotes, amplifiers ... using isoprop. I have had ~ 80% succees. Sometimes I have had to repeat the process as sometimes there is some nasty salt / sugar /xx which seemingly reappears after some time.

//P

[AK-47]

I read the thread title and thought you were requesting the MX Package Team to port "Babe, the Laptop Assassin" to the MX package repository, thinking it was maybe some kind of specialised laptop stress test suite.

Another option is a second-hand Panasonic Toughbook with a rubber keyboard. A second-hand one may work and for a fraction of the price of a new one, but older models didn't have a terrific screen resolution (1024x768).

[j2mcgreg]

Thanks for the replies. The problem for me was that the the market for refurb laptops is pretty thin here (Toronto) at the brick and mortar stores, so I elected to buy a new laptop instead.

The Probook is well and truly dead. Here's the QSI of the new unit:

Code: Select all

System:    Kernel: 5.10.0-20-amd64 [5.10.158-2] x86_64 bits: 64 compiler: gcc v: 10.2.1 
           parameters: BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-5.10.0-20-amd64 
           root=UUID=<filter> ro quiet splash 
           Desktop: Xfce 4.18.1 tk: Gtk 3.24.24 info: xfce4-panel wm: xfwm 4.18.0 vt: 7 
           dm: LightDM 1.26.0 Distro: MX-21.3_x64 Wildflower January 15  2023 
           base: Debian GNU/Linux 11 (bullseye) 
Machine:   Type: Laptop System: HP product: HP Laptop 15-ef2xxx v: N/A serial: <filter> Chassis: 
           type: 10 serial: <filter> 
           Mobo: HP model: 887A v: 59.17 serial: <filter> UEFI: AMI v: F.25 date: 07/05/2022 
Battery:   ID-1: BAT0 charge: 40.6 Wh (99.8%) condition: 40.7/40.7 Wh (100.0%) volts: 12.9 
           min: 11.3 model: HP Primary type: Li-ion serial: <filter> status: Unknown 
CPU:       Info: Quad Core model: AMD Ryzen 3 5300U with Radeon Graphics bits: 64 type: MT MCP 
           arch: Zen 2 family: 17 (23) model-id: 68 (104) stepping: 1 microcode: 8608103 cache: 
           L2: 2 MiB 
           flags: avx avx2 lm nx pae sse sse2 sse3 sse4_1 sse4_2 sse4a ssse3 svm bogomips: 41522 
           Speed: 1600 MHz min/max: 1400/3900 MHz boost: enabled Core speeds (MHz): 1: 1600 
           2: 1552 3: 1693 4: 1649 5: 1660 6: 1702 7: 2522 8: 1874 
           Vulnerabilities: Type: itlb_multihit status: Not affected 
           Type: l1tf status: Not affected 
           Type: mds status: Not affected 
           Type: meltdown status: Not affected 
           Type: mmio_stale_data status: Not affected 
           Type: retbleed mitigation: untrained return thunk; SMT enabled with STIBP protection 
           Type: spec_store_bypass 
           mitigation: Speculative Store Bypass disabled via prctl and seccomp 
           Type: spectre_v1 mitigation: usercopy/swapgs barriers and __user pointer sanitization 
           Type: spectre_v2 mitigation: Retpolines, IBPB: conditional, STIBP: always-on, RSB 
           filling, PBRSB-eIBRS: Not affected 
           Type: srbds status: Not affected 
           Type: tsx_async_abort status: Not affected 
Graphics:  Device-1: AMD Lucienne vendor: Hewlett-Packard driver: amdgpu v: kernel bus-ID: 03:00.0 
           chip-ID: 1002:164c class-ID: 0300 
           Device-2: Luxvisions Innotech Limited HP TrueVision HD Camera type: USB 
           driver: uvcvideo bus-ID: 1-3:2 chip-ID: 30c9:0013 class-ID: 0e02 serial: <filter> 
           Display: x11 server: X.Org 1.20.11 compositor: xfwm4 v: 4.18.0 driver: 
           loaded: amdgpu,ati unloaded: fbdev,modesetting,vesa display-ID: :0.0 screens: 1 
           Screen-1: 0 s-res: 1920x1080 s-dpi: 96 s-size: 508x285mm (20.0x11.2") 
           s-diag: 582mm (22.9") 
           Monitor-1: eDP res: 1920x1080 hz: 60 dpi: 142 size: 344x194mm (13.5x7.6") 
           diag: 395mm (15.5") 
           OpenGL: renderer: AMD RENOIR (DRM 3.40.0 5.10.0-20-amd64 LLVM 11.0.1) 
           v: 4.6 Mesa 20.3.5 direct render: Yes 
Audio:     Device-1: AMD Renoir Radeon High Definition Audio vendor: Hewlett-Packard 
           driver: snd_hda_intel v: kernel bus-ID: 03:00.1 chip-ID: 1002:1637 class-ID: 0403 
           Device-2: AMD ACP/ACP3X/ACP6x Audio Coprocessor 
           vendor: Hewlett-Packard Raven/Raven2/FireFlight/Renoir Processor 
           driver: snd_rn_pci_acp3x v: kernel alternate: snd_pci_acp3x bus-ID: 03:00.5 
           chip-ID: 1022:15e2 class-ID: 0480 
           Device-3: AMD Family 17h/19h HD Audio vendor: Hewlett-Packard driver: snd_hda_intel 
           v: kernel bus-ID: 03:00.6 chip-ID: 1022:15e3 class-ID: 0403 
           Sound Server-1: ALSA v: k5.10.0-20-amd64 running: yes 
           Sound Server-2: PulseAudio v: 14.2 running: yes 
Network:   Device-1: Realtek RTL8822CE 802.11ac PCIe Wireless Network Adapter 
           vendor: Hewlett-Packard driver: rtw_8822ce v: N/A modules: rtw88_8822ce,wl port: f000 
           bus-ID: 01:00.0 chip-ID: 10ec:c822 class-ID: 0280 
           IF: wlan0 state: up mac: <filter> 
Bluetooth: Device-1: Realtek Bluetooth Radio type: USB driver: btusb v: 0.8 bus-ID: 1-4:3 
           chip-ID: 0bda:b00c class-ID: e001 serial: <filter> 
           Report: hciconfig ID: hci0 rfk-id: 1 state: up address: <filter> bt-v: 3.0 lmp-v: 5.1 
           sub-v: a0cb hci-v: 5.1 rev: 9a8 
           Info: acl-mtu: 1021:6 sco-mtu: 255:12 link-policy: rswitch hold sniff park 
           link-mode: slave accept service-classes: rendering, capturing, object transfer, audio 
Drives:    Local Storage: total: 484.44 GiB used: 23.93 GiB (4.9%) 
           SMART Message: Unable to run smartctl. Root privileges required. 
           ID-1: /dev/nvme0n1 maj-min: 259:0 vendor: Western Digital 
           model: PC SN530 SDBPNPZ-512G-1006 size: 476.94 GiB block-size: physical: 512 B 
           logical: 512 B speed: 31.6 Gb/s lanes: 4 type: SSD serial: <filter> rev: HPS2 
           temp: 29.9 C scheme: GPT 
           ID-2: /dev/sda maj-min: 8:0 type: USB model: General UDisk size: 7.5 GiB block-size: 
           physical: 512 B logical: 512 B type: N/A serial: <filter> rev: 5.00 
           SMART Message: Unknown USB bridge. Flash drive/Unsupported enclosure? 
Partition: ID-1: / raw-size: 468.68 GiB size: 460.25 GiB (98.20%) used: 23.87 GiB (5.2%) fs: ext4 
           dev: /dev/nvme0n1p2 maj-min: 259:2 
           ID-2: /boot/efi raw-size: 256 MiB size: 252 MiB (98.46%) used: 282 KiB (0.1%) fs: vfat 
           dev: /dev/nvme0n1p1 maj-min: 259:1 
Swap:      Kernel: swappiness: 15 (default 60) cache-pressure: 100 (default) 
           ID-1: swap-1 type: partition size: 8 GiB used: 512 KiB (0.0%) priority: -2 
           dev: /dev/nvme0n1p3 maj-min: 259:3 
Sensors:   System Temperatures: cpu: 49.5 C mobo: 44.0 C gpu: amdgpu temp: 45.0 C 
           Fan Speeds (RPM): N/A 
Repos:     Packages: note: see --pkg apt: 1973 lib: 991 flatpak: 0 
           No active apt repos in: /etc/apt/sources.list 
           Active apt repos in: /etc/apt/sources.list.d/debian-stable-updates.list 
           1: deb http://deb.debian.org/debian bullseye-updates main contrib non-free
           Active apt repos in: /etc/apt/sources.list.d/debian.list 
           1: deb http://deb.debian.org/debian bullseye main contrib non-free
           2: deb http://security.debian.org/debian-security bullseye-security main contrib non-free
           Active apt repos in: /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google-chrome.list 
           1: deb [arch=amd64] https://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/ stable main
           Active apt repos in: /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mx.list 
           1: deb http://mirrors.rit.edu/mxlinux/mx-packages/mx/repo/ bullseye main non-free
Info:      Processes: 299 Uptime: 1h 7m wakeups: 656 Memory: 7.17 GiB used: 1.52 GiB (21.2%) 
           Init: SysVinit v: 2.96 runlevel: 5 default: 5 tool: systemctl Compilers: gcc: N/A 
           alt: 10 Client: shell wrapper v: 5.1.4-release inxi: 3.3.06 
Boot Mode: UEFI

[Adrian]

Everything working OK on the new laptop? I see you don't run AHS on it...

[j2mcgreg]

Everything working OK on the new laptop? I see you don't run AHS on it...

Everything seems fine. I decided to go with the standard version because the bios dates from May '22 which means that the laptop was probably designed in late '21. I figured that was plenty of time for the standard kernel to have caught up.

[razor2021]

The ProBook is not dead. Use a hair dryer on warm setting. It will resurrect when its dried off.

[Freja]

152822fb.jpg

This is Babe. Target is ProBook identified. Permission to fire.

No, Use Mandarin Orange sparkling water. directly fire on the keyboard, Do it.

Roger that.