Originally published at: If your ThinkPad boots into beepy tunes, trouble is afoot | Boing Boing
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The app is only available for Android?
Who else might wonder how long this function will continue to work? I’d expect Lenovo will have changed their online support for it within 5 years.
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Firstly, thank you for the windows95tips link - just snorted wine over my keyboard:
This reminded me of my LG washing machine - it has this symbol on the front:
We bought it in 2011, so long before this ThinkPad idea. The SmartDiagnosis concept was that you could call their support centre, then trigger playback of the diagnostic tone down the line for them to analyze - the description was:
I’ve never tried it before - until now! If I get enough time I might even try the diagnostics trick described in the article:
It seems their more recent products also have something similar, but now there’s an app for your phone that does the first step diagnostics.
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I know 2017 is an aeon in computer time but come on, this is like something from the dawn of the computer age. How baroque…
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“What’s that, Flipper? Timmy has fallen down the well?”
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I think that code means Timmy is stuck in the washing machine, as a result of playing spaceships in there.
Can you change out the tune?
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When I had problems with my car, I used to call my brother and imitate the car’s engine noises. He usually hit/guessed problems with great accuracy.
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Or Flipper just wants to play classic games.
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Not only that, but the linked article says the app doesn’t even run on recent Android devices.
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And what happens if your ThinkPad is no longer under warranty?
No kink shaming here.
At least, it looks like it’s consensual.
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Yes and it works the same way. The phone mic reads the tones and the app interprets their meaning. I’ve used it a couple times before to do troubleshooting.
As an aside I fucking hate ThinkPads and they are some of the worst laptops I’ve ever had the displeasure of using. Their keyboards are pure garbage and they constantly beep at me when I type too quickly and overload the keyboard matrix. It’s aggravating as hell.
My current work ThinkPad is almost completely non functional when not plugged in because even under almost zero load it goes into extreme throttling and runs at sub-1GHz speeds because its thermals management is garbage. It also has this stupid presence detection crap that I can’t seem to turn off where it locks the display if I step away for like 30 seconds.
I often wish I could throw this piece of junk out the window so I could get a replacement, but I’m sure I’d just end up with another of the same damn model.
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