Home

Bought a secondhand laptop to take some of the wear and tear off of my daily driver, and spent the better part of the afternoon and most of the evening trying to get the sound working. Sound card was detected, the headphones worked, and it acted like sound was playing but the speakers weren’t making a peep.

Messed around with every Pipewire setting I could find, tried re-mapping the internal “pins” with some obscure JACK utility, tried several kernel flags, and went down several more rabbit holes that looked promising all to no avail.

Finally took the thing apart, and the speakers were just disconnected from the motherboard 🤦‍♂️ Apparently the refurbishing company forgot to re-attach them.

All in all, not bad for a $150 “beater” laptop.

I would have been looking for hidden porn.

It’s a “beater” laptop, so unless you’re into BDSM…

Nice, I always run a quick live image to test the hardware with a new machine. If it doesn’t work with something using Linux I will try something else possibly including windows 7 just to check that sound works for example. Knowing it if is hardware or software saves days of agonising troubleshooting.

Nice, I need to get something like that for a backup as my primary needs some kind of repair. I think new laptops might be now or soon very expensive because those parasites at the AI companies running the llm’s are buyin all the chips.

I can hardly wait for the bubble to pop just so we don’t get overcharged on everything but you just know they will pay off the government to bail them out.

As a beater laptop I presumed it was used primarily for porn.

i was jokingly implying the porn you’d find would likely be of a violent “beater” variety - which is not my kind of thing, anyway.

I usually do that, too, but didn’t bother this time since it’s a slightly different model but uses the same motherboard as my old work-issue laptop, and I already knew everything worked in Linux except the fingerprint sensor. Only fired up the W11 install it came with to make sure it wasn’t DOA and wiped it immediately after – I just forgot to check the speakers lol.

I was joking it was a beating off computer, a beater computer.