Lenovo UEFI Bug Only Likes Windows and RHEL 162
New submitter Nagilum23 writes "It looks like Lenovo only knows of Windows and RHEL where their Thinkcentre M92p desktop is concerned. While investigating UEFI boot issues, Matthew Garrett found the PC's firmware actually checks the descriptive string for the operating system, and will prevent unlisted operating systems from booting. Garrett writes, 'Every UEFI boot entry has a descriptive string. This is used by the firmware when it's presenting a menu to users - instead of "Hard drive 0" and "USB drive 3", the firmware can list "Windows Boot Manager" and "Fedora Linux". There's no reason at all for the firmware to be parsing these strings. ... there is a function that compares the descriptive string against "Windows Boot Manager" and appears to return an error if it doesn't match. What's stranger is that it also checks for "Red Hat Enterprise Linux" and lets that one work as well. ... This is, obviously, bizarre. A vendor appears to have actually written additional code to check whether an OS claims to be Windows before it'll let it boot. Someone then presumably tested booting RHEL on it and discovered that it didn't work. Rather than take out that check, they then addded another check to let RHEL boot as well."
Note that this isn't a SecureBoot issue. Lenovo is aware of the problem and looking into it.
How easy is it to spoof the string? (Score:2, Insightful)
... my guess would be VERY. No problem here for haxors. For the rest of us, just don't buy this crap.
Bug? (Score:5, Insightful)
You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.
It's not a bug if it's by design, and this is clearly intended behavior.
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Re:Bug? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Just for the record, my family had a Packard Bell that ran Mandrake Linux extremely reliably for many years. Though from listening to other people complain about Packard Bells online, I guess we got the only good one they ever made :)
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Packard Bell released a bios update for my system (406CD) that i bought in 1995 to improve compatibility with other operating systems. At different times, I had WIndows 3.11 + DOS 6.22, IBM PC-DOS 7, OS/2 Warp 3 & 4, Redhat 5, Windows 95, Windows NT 4, and BeOS 5 running on it. It was the most compatible computer I've ever owned. The sound card, video card and modem worked with everything.
Re:Bug? (Score:5, Interesting)
You're making assumptions about what the intended behavior was. I think it unlikely that they intended to make the machine unbootable for anything other than Windows and RHEL. The bug (yes, bug) probably began with a hack to work around some windows issue that broke booting for anything else. Then, because they maybe only test with windows and rhel, some moron "fixed" the bug by adding a check for RHEL.
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It's a bug in the developer. His intentions were a mistake and cause a segfault in the open source community.
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Never attribute to malice that which can adequately be attributed to stupidity.
Corollary: Any sufficiently shocking display of stupidity is indistinguishable from malice
Re:Bug? (Score:4, Insightful)
Never attribute to malice that which can adequately be attributed to stupidity.
I guess you haven't seen enough of Microsoft's actions, who are doing their utmost to disprove Hanlon's razor.
I doubt this was entirely intentional (Score:2)
Re:I doubt this was entirely intentional (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I doubt this was entirely intentional (Score:5, Informative)
There is a reason for this:
The mini-PCI card is just the radio. The antenna is in the rest of the laptop (usually around the screen). The FCC only certifies them for certain radio+antenna pairings, and so they cannot get certification if they don't put in some mechanism to stop you from using uncertified pairings.
It's stupid yes, but the idea behind the policy is to allow the sale of high-power radios while keeping it within exposure limits. (the reason being is the same power going into an omnidirectional antenna safely can not only exceed but blow-out-of-the-water the exposure limits if put into a directional antenna. think bulb vs laser)
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It seems unlikely. I can easily buy a high powered mini-PCI card bare and on most systems, pair it with any antenna. My setup may or may not comply with regulations, but it's on me to make sure it does or seek an appropriate license (in practice, many people don't bother and as long as it doesn't create an interference problem, they'll never hear about it).
In practice, the built-in laptop antennae are on the low end and certainly are not strongly directional (though they often have unintentional dead areas)
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My point was there is some enforced limitation as a means of butt-covering, rather than just being jerks. Lenovo (or Dell or whoever) doesn't want to risk being dragged into anything (since the antenna is theirs) so they just lock you out.
You're right about the directionality, but there's another bit to consider: how much energy can that antenna support? If it can only support 200mw and you try pushing 1w into it, it could very well pose a fire hazard.
Still, really they should just bugger off and leave it t
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You are clutching at straws and I have no idea why. The most energy the wire could ever radiate is the amount pumped in to it. Even if the case was made of guncotton, an 800mw transmitter couldn't heat it enough to cause a fire.
No other vendor does anything stupid like that.
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Sure, but the transmitter certainly could smoke and burn. I've seen it happen. (I am a ham, I should mention).
I'm not trying to support Lenovo, I am not grasping at straws. You are misunderstanding my point. (which is there are valid, if construed, reasons for locking you out from this... they are not doing it out of spite or just to be difficult)
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I am simply not buying what you're selling, ham or not. We're talking 800mW, not 800 Watts here (and at that, 800mW cards are rare. 100 and 50 mW is common). That is 0.8 Watts MAX. I have no doubt that bad things can happen to ham gear at hundreds or thousands of watts if you use the wrong antenna, but this is low powered ISM stuff here. Nothing bad happens if the antenna is disconnected entirely. Nothing bad happens if you connect/dis-connect the antenna while the transmitter is on. Nothing bad happens if
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Eh, your points are fair. We're arguing on how we got there, not that we got there. Let's leave it at that?
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Sure, all of the studying I needed to do to get my own license. That's how these sorts of things work. I may be wrong, but I think you need to provide proof of that to me, not the other way around.
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Well... (Score:2, Informative)
Never ascribe to malice what can be explained by Microsoft getting desperate.
Re:Well... (Score:5, Interesting)
Given that RHEL is probably their biggest competator that move could be considered a counter to - I would say you need to put down your anti-ms tinfoil hat, your brain is overheating.
It's probably a support engineer related decision - "We don't want to have to deal with questions/complaints regarding unsupported operating systems that have gotten installed... so we'll prevent them from being installed."
Neither malice or ms-induced maice, but rather just an idiotic solution to an annoying issue that they probably have to periodically deal with.
Glad I don't buy Lenovo. I tend to prefer FreeBSD and Hackintosh'ed as my non MS OS.
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Given that RHEL is probably their biggest competator that move could be considered a counter to - I would say you need to put down your anti-ms tinfoil hat, your brain is overheating.
Ahhh, yes, black is white, there are no black helicopters and all that jazz........ It's firmly in that bracket.
It's probably a support engineer related decision - "We don't want to have to deal with questions/complaints regarding unsupported operating systems that have gotten installed... so we'll prevent them from being installed."
Errrrr, no. For one thing this actually takes effort which hardware manufacturers are not prone to actually putting in, for another I didn't think they give a crap about supporting any Linux operating systems and conveniently Red Hat is the only distribution Microsoft recognises for the purposes of their 'Safeboot' keys.
I tend to prefer FreeBSD and Hackintosh'ed as my non MS OS.
Nice of you to let us know that after telling everyone their paranoid lunatics
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Errrrr, no. For one thing this actually takes effort which hardware manufacturers are not prone to actually putting in, for another I didn't think they give a crap about supporting any Linux operating systems
Actually Lenovo are often pretty good [lenovo.com] about supporting Linux - e.g. they provide information and often drivers and support. I don't think the M92p is a model for which they do this though.
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I use whatever the hell works. But when someone prevents me from using something that would work, just because it's not the most popular alternative, I tend to get pissed.
I know they don't care about supporting any Linux operating systems, that's what I said. Having worked with nutjob support engineers/management before, the change described in TFS is something I could see them requesting to their bosses, to make support easier (if they can't install it, they can't ask about run time issues), and their boss
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Are you talking about RHEL or Windows? Because I know Linux can support 16TB de-duplicated volumes for a variety of file systems. Windows however is the one who can't support anything.
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Ugh. We use RHEL a lot where I work. We finally got rid of the crashy Solaris shit a few years ago.
As far as 16TB disks, to my knowledge we have well larger than that, on both RHEL boxes and NAS (making the OS using it irrelevant). Thought it's anecdotal, it seem Linux (primarily fronted by RHEL) is well more popular than Solaris. Having worked with both, I'd say I much prefer RHEL.
are you serious? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't see how you can consider this a "bug"? You don't just "accidentally test a string for a specific value". This is clearly intentional operation, not a bug.
Re:are you serious? (Score:5, Insightful)
Bug is probably the wrong term here. I think "hilariously bad design decision" is a more apt description. Clearly someone didn't think this all the way through.
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sure they did think it.
the testing checklist included booting on rhel and windows and that's what it boots on - and presumably testing that some os without a signature doesn't boot. never mind it actually being secure or anything, because surely nobody would lie in their descriptive string right?
can't believe the engineers thought that they would actually ship this though..
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Man, if you only knew what ships out there...
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Bug is the right term here. Terrible design decisions and intentional but stupid implementation decisions are also bugs.
Re:are you serious? (Score:4, Interesting)
Clearly someone didn't think this all the way through.
or possibly: somebody merged a diff early. Microsoft gets control of UEFI, RHAT buys a license, and on Day-Zero all new Windows OEM machines ship with UEFI string checkers that only boot Windows or RHEL (without string 'hacks' - possible legal claims over fraud, +- DMCA interoperability claims).
Nah, could never happen.
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If it got through testing by accident, then it's a type of bug.
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or if outright failure wasn't the intended action. Could be they intended to print a warning or something instead. I find this a bit much to swallow but there's a chance of it.
That's just great (Score:3)
Re:That's just great (Score:5, Informative)
It's nothing to do with Secure Boot, just dodgy BIOS-writing again.
From TFS: "There's no reason at all for the firmware to be parsing these strings."
This is basically on a par with Windows 3.1 looking for MS-DOS signatures and refusing to boot otherwise (though that had an illegally anticompetitive reason), with BIOS's like the one I just forced an update from my supplier for (by threatening to return a significant number of laptops) which consisted of a BIOS checking for a certain value on disk being 00 before it would boot from that disk (a value which corresponds to 00 only on unencrypted Windows NTFS-formatted disks) and refusing to boot Truecrypt'd disks or anything with a non-NTFS primary partition (very common on certain HP and Dell models, that particular "bug"), and the like of which I've seen DOZENS of times in my own purchases because of:
STUPID BIOS WRITERS.
There is no reason to ever test that string, and certainly none to use it as a conditional to boot. It has nothing to do with any advertised UEFI feature whatsoever. The fact that the UEFI code even bothers to interrogate that string for anything other than displaying it to the user tells you that the manufacturer doesn't care about, and doesn't test, anything but Windows to the point they will hard-core their machines to only run Windows. They don't care about UEFI at all, or secure booting, or anything - just that it works when they run Windows.
Makes you kinda wonder who would ultimately be behind putting such an unnecessary and counter-productive decision into a machine's BIOS really.
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Perhaps allow IT to make that call, but forcing it? That's retarded.
Re:That's just great (Score:5, Interesting)
Most likely: the firmware is outsourced, and the outsources implements it to the letter, without applying any thinking.
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I was looking at a heavily discounted HP box on sale, and the one review of the model on Amazon stated exactly this -- it only booted Windows and nothing else.
If PC makers sell boxes that only boot Windows, they need to both put a warning that functionality has been deliberately limited/crippled, and give the customer a steep discount for shipping equipment that deliberately only functions in a limited context.
This isn't a knock against MS... if a PC is limited to any OS, that is a deliberate de-functioning
Re:That's just great (Score:4, Insightful)
The fact that the UEFI code even bothers to interrogate that string for anything other than displaying it to the user tells you that the manufacturer doesn't care about, and doesn't test, anything but Windows to the point they will hard-core their machines to only run Windows. They don't care about UEFI at all, or secure booting, or anything - just that it works when they run Windows.
Makes you kinda wonder who would ultimately be behind putting such an unnecessary and counter-productive decision into a machine's BIOS really.
And people don't believe me when I tell them that OEMs will chomp at the bit to lock people out of other OSs with secure boot when MS finally flips the switch. They already care about nothing but Windows.
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That's a great idea. Someone who wrote a virus to boot before the OS would never think to tell UEFI that it was the Windows Boot Manager.
Well, the UEFI boot images are cryptographically signed, so they'd need to do more than just copy a string; That sounds more like a BIOS writer making a shorrtcut instead of implementing the full EFI spec -- Search for a string instead of implement /FAT (12 | (16 | 32))/ ... OR maybe just add an exceptional case to already flawed code to get RHEL working. However:
Secure Boot's a GREAT IDEA, Why, someone who found a flaw in your OS would NEVER think to just re-exploit it after it boots up instead of mess wi
The apple has fallen quite far from the tree (Score:3, Insightful)
I used to like IBM and Lenovo computers. But his offends me.
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Since I've no mod points, and couldn't mod this topic anyway... Seconded.
Manufacturers shouldn't be able to tell the users of their hardware what software can be used on their hardware. At most, they should say "there are known issues of this software potentially physical damage." And if I got that, I'd probably reply with "The 80s/early 90s called, they want their computer problems back."
Shrug, plenty of other good hardware vendors out there. Though for a desktop, I've never understood not building your ow
Walled gardening with impunity (Score:2)
Manufacturers shouldn't be able to tell the users of their hardware what software can be used on their hardware.
I agree with you that they shouldn't be able to. But in the real world, manufacturers of computing devices for home use have been getting away with walled gardening since 1986 when the NES and Atari 7800 came out.
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The only argument I can come up with that, is that consoles aren't sold with the intent of being general purpose computers, and I don't think anybody really thinks of that as their intent, only us geeks find the idea of getting them to fulfill that purpose, to be amusing and fun.
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Sony attempted to do this with their Playstation 2 (and the Playstation 3) in order to work around taxes, not because they actually wanted it general purpose.
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True, but I have long since decided that Sony and 'integrity' are oxymorons.
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only us geeks find the idea of getting them to fulfill that purpose, to be amusing and fun.
That and anyone who wants to develop a video game but happens not to live near established video game studios.
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Obviously for internal security (Score:2, Funny)
Lenovo limits your OS choice. Obviously there is a reason...and the likely one is that the OS choices they steer you towards are the ones that have the handy back doors installed for remote monitoring. Isn't that what you would do if you needed to monitor users?
Testing the water? (Score:2)
Re:Testing the water? (Score:4, Interesting)
Then all Linux distributions, plus EFF, should sue Lenovo, if for no other reason then just to show how much everyone cares. I would contribute to that if necessary.
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How many of them will notice when it refuses the "Windows 9" boot string, or someone in their home country notices that it refuses a string with Chinese characters in it.
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here, breath into this bag. (Score:3)
if it must frob for strings, let's all just agree to put "grub" in there.
And so it starts..... (Score:2)
fixing what isn't broken (Score:5, Insightful)
UEFI is pretty much a case of fixing what isn't broken, yet with any software project its bound to have bugs in the first few iterations.
And, oh boy does it. name brand motherboards that brick when flashed, systems that don't power off correctly, systems that take minutes to post, the usual issues with incorrect ACPI table entries, the list goes on.
Basically, its replacing one fairly stable code base, that the motherboard vendors often got wrong, with a completely new untested one that is 10x as complicated. You do the math.
Linus had another rant about it recently called "The abomination called EFI".
BTW: Gigabyte has a number of traditional motherboards that can boot GPT partitions, effectively removing the _ONE_ useful new feature in EFI.
Re:fixing what isn't broken (Score:5, Informative)
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Only because they decided to create something entirely new instead of switching to OpenFirmware. The 16-bit limitations on the BIOS are ridiculous in this day and age and moving to a new interface that ditches the ridiculous constraints imposed by the 8086 more than 30 years ago is a good thing.
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he 16-bit limitations on the BIOS are ridiculous in this day and age and moving to a new interface that ditches the ridiculous constraints imposed by the 8086 more than 30 years ago is a good thing.
No one really gives a crap what the bios runs in, you site OpenFirmware which is another example of old crufty stuff. I should know as I worked professionally on it for a while. 16bit-x86 is a better firmware environment than forth. Let me site one of many examples of why openfirmware sucks worse than nearly any
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Yea, EFI was originally designed for IA-64 which is completely different from x86.
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To be fair, the traditional BIOS was pretty complex for its time, not to mention clunky today. UEFI wasn't a bad idea in principle, it just became one when they threw the kitchen sink in there.
Also there are probably far more people capable of writing a UEFI BIOS than a traditional all-assembler BIOS.
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Also there are probably far more people capable of writing a UEFI BIOS than a traditional all-assembler BIOS.
And there isn't any reason someone couldn't have rewritten the vast majority of the traditional BIOS functionality in C, with gcc. You would simply have to have write some code to covert the assembly soft interrupt api's (named register/params) to a C calling convention.
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The reason is that the BIOS is limited to 1MB in size, and if you use C, you will get far fewer functions to fit in the 1MB than if you wrote it in assembler.
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The legacy BIOS isn't exactly simple, it's just old and well known. It also has a lot of ancient cruft not found in PCs now and has to operate in a mode (16-bit real mode) that simply makes no sense for 64-bit processors and imposes a ton of restrictions that have no real business being maintained.
So you're saying that BIOSes never had GUIs or devi
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That's pretty much what every architecture other than x86 has in their firmware/boot loader.
x86, instead, lived with putting lots of extra complexity into the boot loader and kernel. Things like GRUB would be completely unnecessary on, eg. DEC Alpha systems. INITRD could mostly be replaced/eliminated as well. And indeed, anyone who has had to deal with boot problems with their Linux system on x86 can testify that
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WTF are you talking about? How does the BIOS hand-off to the boot loader (eg. GRUB) on the active partition, if the BIOS doesn't even know what a partition is?
Yes, you can stick a loader in the MBR and the BIOS will be able to load it, but there's so little space available there that you've gotta do neat tricks to get enough smarts in that little slice of disk to be able to read partitions and files, to be able to find the next stage
TPM is the worst (Score:5, Interesting)
Because I'm lazy, I'll just copy and paste a comment I made in another thread about TPM
Ever since TPM was created, we're always just a few bits and bytes away from having it leveraged against us, by them.
And by "us" I mean "the computer users."
By "them" I mean "the hardware manufacturers and software/media companies."
Example: The newest motherboards don't *need* the ability to disable trusted boot. Heck, it'd have been easier to not include it!
We're more or less at the mercy of a small number of companies and their design decisions.
I recently found out, while looking at new laptops, that Lenovo & HP like to put whitelists of wireless cards into the BIOS.
Someone hacked the BIOS and other cards will work, but for whatever reason, Lenovo/HP doesn't want you to use a storebought card.
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I've caught HP x86 servers doing the same thing with video cards. I wanted to run a PCIe video board not sold by HP. It simply failed, the BIOS refused to init it, and removed its parent bridge from the device list passed to the OS.
Re:TPM is the worst (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not a mystery, but it is inappropriate. Drives me nuts when companies pull this. If I buy your PC, I expect it to work and support all the standards you claim it does. That includes attaching other hardware that adheres to the same standards. I appreciate that there's a dicey issue in there of determining who is at fault when something doesn't work, but that doesn't justify artificially forcing a bunch of hardware not to work. When you do that, YOU are the problem by definition, as you are the party causing it not to work.
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Yup, it is like having a car with a proprietary cigarette light adapter plug because the vendor is concerned that you'll short it out with a bad device.
Or like having phones hard-wired into the system by the telephone company (used to be standard practice). I hear there are still people paying a few bucks a month to rent a battleship phone from the 50s.
If my VGA card fries the motherboard feel free to not honor the warranty, but you can't pull that excuse when the damage is not attributable to something yo
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Actually, Microsoft requires it for x86 - the option to disable trusted boot MUST be present in order to pass Windows 8 logo certification. So it's not some "feel good" company providing it, it's required. Plus well, if you want to boot Windows 7, you can't use trusted boot - you have to use
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They don't advertise miniPCI slots as available on the system.
That doesn't make deliberately crippling the slots in order to sell more proprietary hardware any better. I don't care if they advertise it or not. It is a mini-PCI slot and they are deliberately breaking it. They're assholes.
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They don't advertise miniPCI slots as available on the system. They advertise 802.11 B/G/N and Bluetooth 3.0 + EDR and or/WiDi support.
They simply have included wireless functionality that happens to use miniPCI slots rather than being soldered to the main board.
The fact that you can pull the system apart, and insert a different card in there isn't an advertised end user feature, and they clearly don't support it on their low end hardware to keep support costs (and thus unit costs) down.
They only use a miniPCI Card in there so that they can offer different models with the same mainbaord and different capabilities, and so that they can swap out a bad card if they get a machine in for repair. It's not an advertised end user feature.
It has nothing to do with support costs. It has to do with selling replacement parts at a huge markup....
Re:TPM is the worst (Score:4, Insightful)
... whatever reason, Lenovo/HP doesn't want you to use a storebought card.
Warranty and support. There isn't any real mystery there..unless you are a dimwit. Are you a dimwit?
YEA! Like how GM and Ford have locked-out the ability to replace the factory-approved air filter with a K&N, because they don't want to "warranty and support" the aftermarket parts!
Stupid prick.
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Those are hardly the same. Replacement air filters pose zero liability to GM and Ford.
If you have a problem with your car, you are going to take it somewhere to get fixed. If the car is under warranty and the problem is NOT with your replacement filter, you pay nothing and the manufacturer pays the cost of repairs. If the problem turns out to be your replacement filter YOU must pay the cost of diagnosing and repairing that problem (and are not getting your car back until you do), and the manufacturer hos
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Those are hardly the same. Replacement air filters pose zero liability to GM and Ford.
If you have a problem with your car, you are going to take it somewhere to get fixed. If the car is under warranty and the problem is NOT with your replacement filter, you pay nothing and the manufacturer pays the cost of repairs. If the problem turns out to be your replacement filter YOU must pay the cost of diagnosing and repairing that problem (and are not getting your car back until you do), and the manufacturer hos zero cost because of that problem.
This makes it different how? If it's not a warrantied part, you get charged for the replacement. That's a pretty standard term for all warrantied items.
On the other hand, if you buy a cheap computer (which these are) and replace a component and subsequently have a problem, you are going to call their support center (a direct cost to them). If the support center thinks it may be a warranty problem, they will pay for you to ship the computer for repair (another cost for them). Now they must diagnose the problem (more cost to them). If it turns out to be your replacement part that was the problem, now what? They could require you to pay for the original shipping cost, the original phone call, the cost of diagnostics, and the return shipping cost before they ship your PC back, but how many people are going to do that (remember, this was a cheap computer to start with)? Now they are stuck with a broken computer, in a configuration they don't support, that they can spend still more money on to get it back into a supported, working configuration, in hopes that MAYBE they can recoup their loses by selling it as a refurb.
I see, so basically, your position is, "it's different because call center employees are dumb."
Yea, that dog don't hunt, monseigneur.
Just like with auto warranties, it doesn't take a legal expert to realize that a clause stating "any costs associated with repairs or damage resulting from the use of unapproved aftermarket parts will be charged to the cu
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Why would have have to disclose that? They never claimed that there was a usable port in there, or that the wireless card was user-replaceable, only that the laptop supported 802.11b/g/n. And it does indeed support as sold, just as they claimed. The consumer got exactly what they paid for. The fact that a particular consumer wants something OTHER than what he paid for does not constitute any kind of fraud on the manufacturers part.
Re:TPM is the worst (Score:4, Informative)
Like how GM and Ford have locked-out the ability to replace the factory-approved air filter with a K&N, because they don't want to "warranty and support" the aftermarket parts!
*cough* And we know they never tried anything like that because if they had, then there would be something like a Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act [wikipedia.org], which would clearly state that companies like GM and Ford could not prevent customers from using aftermarket parts [cornell.edu].
Stupid prick.
There's no need to sign your post at the end. We can all see who you are by looking at the header.
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Like how GM and Ford have locked-out the ability to replace the factory-approved air filter with a K&N, because they don't want to "warranty and support" the aftermarket parts!
*cough* And we know they never tried anything like that because if they had, then there would be something like a Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act [wikipedia.org], which would clearly state that companies like GM and Ford could not prevent customers from using aftermarket parts [cornell.edu].
That doesn't mean what you think it means. the Magnuson-Moss Warranty act basically states that an automotive warranty cannot be voided in full merely by installing aftermarket parts; however, it does allow the warranty of related systems to be voided if it is apparent that an aftermarket part caused the malfunction. In other words, putting aftermarket rims on your car won't void your engine warranty, but if the aftermarket wheels somehow damage the braking system, then the braking system is not covered und
RHEL (Score:3)
Not just Lenovo (Score:2)
Obviously needs to use a sophisticated system (Score:4, Funny)
As seen here,
http://www.csis.pace.edu/~bergin/patterns/ppoop.html [pace.edu]
This whole issue could have been avoided if the developers didn't use the "Hacker Solution", but instead... well, read the paper.
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Though it hardly affects me, I have to highly disagree with the assertions of the paper... I'd say the "Hacker Solution" was the most proper, with the exception of using case instead of nested ifs, and pattern matching (eg. "Win*" instead of multiple full strings hard-coded). Don't underestimate the maintainability of code that
MJG (Score:2)
Always fighting for the users.
PLoP workaround? (Score:2)
Can PLoP Boot Manager work around this?
http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager/index.html [www.plop.at]
That's what you get... (Score:2)
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let MS kill the PC.
there will always be other new hardware.
After PCs die, what hardware will remain that is 1. sold in U.S. stores with showrooms, and 2. not enforcing a walled garden against a machine owner's will like an iPad or game console?
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You can walk into the nearest Walmart and play with a couple of the latest and cheapest Android tablets.
Besides, why the requirement? I haven't used a "showroom" for my computer purchases since my very, very first one, way back when.
To test a device's ergonomics (Score:2)
You can walk into the nearest Walmart and play with a couple of the latest and cheapest Android tablets.
Until Apple sues Android to death.
Besides, why the requirement? I haven't used a "showroom" for my computer purchases since my very, very first one, way back when.
Let me guess: all your computers are desktop computers, whose keyboards are replaceable. Without a showroom, I have no means to compare the feel of an input device to my hands. I recently bought a Bluetooth keyboard for my Nexus 7 tablet. When I discovered that its space bar was so short that my right thumb didn't reach it, I had to make an extra bus trip to the post office and pay to ship it back. See more about the disadvantages of the lack of a showroom [pineight.com].
Re: (Score:2)
Apple has only sued over phones, and vendor-specific software changes. Samsung may be in the headlights, but Android in general is quite safe.
You realize tablets (with one exception) don't come with keyboards, right? To simulate the input device on a tablet, I recommend you cut a pane of glass to the size listed in the tech specs.
Re: (Score:2)
You realize tablets (with one exception) don't come with keyboards, right?
You realize tablets have screens built into them, and screens have either a brightness and viewing angle worth the price or a brightness and viewing angle not worth the price? You realize tablet operating systems in general don't allow splitting the screen to show one application on part of the screen and another on the rest? You realize a 10" tablet with a Bluetooth keyboard is still more expensive than a laptop?
Re: (Score:2)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6WHBO_Qc-Q [youtube.com]