Fixing a P14s Gen 2 Taught Me So Much! #Notebooks #ThinkPad #Shorts

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Transcript

I wouldn’t have thought about buying a ThinkPad P14s Gen 2, the “s” variant of a ThinkPad that Lenovo never made. It was all in the name of utilizing parts from this dead T495, but I ended up with more working machines than I thought I would, and I still have all the parts from the T495 I started with. It’s fascinating to see how the T495, which is a consumer-grade 14” notebook with an AMD Ryzen 5 Pro and Vega 8 Graphics (blue board), is so identical to this semi-professional-grade P14s Gen 2 with an Intel Core i5 11th Gen CPU and a combination of Intel Iris Xe and Nvidia Quadro T500 graphics (green board). I could replace the broken screen from the P14s Gen 2 with the one from the T495, though I ended up buying a replacement for the P14s Gen 2, and that is where the main learning started. The new display housing has an IR camera, which worked great out of the box, and I even used the display and webcam cable that came along with the lid housing. The problem that I later discovered was that the way the lid and the base communicate about the lid open and close states is different, and because this machine was not configured with an IR camera out of the factory, this P14s Gen 2 will not be able to sleep automatically when the lid is closed and wake when it's opened. I guess that’s a trade-off I’d be OK to live with, in exchange for a much better camera arrangement. The bigger learning was that, unlike how this ribbon cable connecting the RJ45 daughter board to the motherboard is socketed on both sides in case of the T495, the one on the P14s Gen 2 is only socketed on one side, while soldered on the other, and I only learned about it after I broken it while accessing the cable underneath while replacing the display housing. The only way to fix it was to buy a replacement RJ45 daughter board itself that comes along with the cable attached.