DrMacintosh

Thunderbolt is well, Thunderbolt. This baby can fit like, idk, 4 PCIe lanes in it. What can USB do? Some data and some power....maybe. Not a fair comparison, but interesting none the less.

Yep, they are fine. We use 2 Seagate Ironwolf drives in our little 4 bay Synology backup NAS. All it really does is make daily backups of OneDrive/SharePoint and cold store data.

The problem is that people paid real money for these phones. Illegally imported or not, the consumer likely had no part in that and simply purchased a phone from a store/private seller. These people have no phone and are now being graciously given a 30% off coupon to buy a new one.

The problem with building a backup to have in case your house burns down is where do you store it? It would have to be off site. If you have a business you can store it there, or maybe at a friends house. Synology NAS devices can backup other Synology NAS devices. So if you had two, there would be your backup strat. I would also consider pricing out Backblaze. They have a tier for NAS storage for just this purpose.

The articles do mention booting to a blank screen. You do get into the machine, but then your image goes away, so that technically applies. If you make a Time Machine backup, there’s no harm in doing a complete restore of the machine. This isn’t likely an issue that can be solved by typing a command in terminal or flipping the right setting. Look at it this way. If the firmware restore doesn’t help, then it’s a hardware issue. Time Machine makes losing user data and apps almost impossible, so it’s an easy diagnostic step to restore the firmware.

So since this is an Apple Silicon Mac, the traditional "PRAM" does not exist, and so those key combos do nothing to an Apple Silicon Mac. Since you mentioned that without an external display, you just get an Apple logo followed by nothing, try following this guide for what to do when a Mac boots to a blank screen: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210905 Since you may not be able to get into recovery mode after following that guide, this guide on how to restore firmware on an Apple Silicon Mac may also be needed: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213662

Rather than doing all of this....quite frankly, user nightmare scenario. You could just get a cheap Android device, talking around $300, and simply put parental restrictions on it? What is the point in loading a custom rom these days? You can already disable the ability to install new apps as a core feature of Android.

Typically yeah, that is the temporary solution. But we use these machines in the field. I’m leaning pretty hard towards just starting fresh.

IdeaPads don’t have BitLocker for starters. IdeaPads typically don’t ship with Pro editions of Windows. Even if it had BitLocker, losing the display doesn’t stop the HDMI port for working. I’m simply fighting a limitation of Windows that prevents you from doing data migration between computers while retaining apps and data.

We don’t need immediate access. We can simply no longer use that computer for surveys. Outside of HCL Notes, everything else we do is via OneDrive/SharePoint and all our other programs are a simple download, register, and go. This specific program, is an in the field survey program which we can’t even download without sending an email. It takes hours to configure and setup and you have to coordinate with the tech to actually do that.

Yes

Hello all, So one of my coworkers dropped their Lenovo IdeaPad and the hinge broke. The machine still works, just does not have a screen. It's an Intel IdeaPad 3 with the Core i3 processor. It has a 2.5" SSD in it right now loaded with a specific program called HCL Notes. Setting up her new computer from scratch would require installing this program again, which has to be done by a 3rd party tech. To avoid this downtime I was thinking about cloning the old machines drive to the new machine, but I foresee some issues with that plan. The replacement computer is an AMD ThinkPad E16 Gen1. It has an M.2 SSD. I have not even booted this machine up yet. I've imaged the ThinkPads drive to have a fallback in case something goes wrong. As far as potential problems go, I can think of a few: Versions/Editions of Windows (IdeaPad is on Windows 10 Home, ThinkPad is on Windows 11 Home) Devices (New machine is Ryzen based with an entirely different supporting architecture) Windows Activation issues? So yeah, I'm just not very confident that cloning the old drive onto the new machine will result in something that works. What do you guys think? Should I just set the machine up from scratch and have the tech configure the program? Or should I try to see if cloning the drive works out?

The iPad really is the first and last choice in tablets. Alternatives from Samsung exist, but are not most consumers first choice. In the lineup of iPads, the 10th Gen iPad is a good device, however needing to use the 1st gen Apple Pencil is a huge drawback, but it's serviceable if you don't mind carrying around the pencil separately. The magic keyboard folio for the 10th gen iPad is rather nice to make up for that though. Anyway, I would look into an iPad Air if possible. Apple, in the US at least, is having its back to school sale right now: https://www.apple.com/us-edu/shop/buy-ipad/ipad-air Alternatively, a refurbished model would be an excellent option. Get one of those, the 2nd Gen Apple Pencil, and a case and you'll be all set. Logitech has a much cheaper keyboard case for iPads if you want one of those. For something that isn't from Apple, the Galaxy Tab S6 Lite gives you a lot of value: https://www.samsung.com/us/mobile/tablets/buy/?modelCode=SM-P613NZAEXAR

I did, using a kit from The Laser Hive: https://thelaserhive.com/product/atx-low-120-kit/ It's a neat project, but honestly not worth it. A legit case is sooooo much more convenient to work with. I can only fit 2 3.5" drives in the case. Thankfully my board has NVMe slots so I used that plus a neat adapter that breaks a single 3.5" drive slot into 2 2.5" drive bays. Also, unless I rip the top shelf out, I can only has blower style GPUs otherwise the card would overheat: The last photo is the current config, the G5 shroud plate and front fans are still installed.