Jan-Lukas Else

Thoughts of an IT expert

Published on 2021-04-14 in 💬 Micro

⚠️ This entry is already over one year old. It may no longer be up to date. Opinions may have changed.

Hoping to get faster WiFi and newer Bluetooth, I bought a new WiFi miniPCIe card for my laptop. As it turns out, there is a whitelist of allowed cards in the BIOS of many ThinkPads. Why is that? 🙄

Tags: ThinkPad

Interactions & Comments

Anonymous A comment by Anonymous There are lots of EC updates to remove that restriction -
Anonymous A comment by Anonymous Some older and newer thinkpads have whitelist for wifi card. My x260 didnt have any problems upgrading from intel 8260 to intel ax200
Vasilii Kolobkov Vasilii Kolobkov: "@en@jlelse.blog what if that unvetted … @en what if that unvetted wifi card would be interfering with passing airplanes while you're not around? Or be complicit to some rogue states or other terrorist organizations?That's too much risk, should've just forked out an extra hundred for a blessed card. Why aren't they the same chips you might ask? Anyway, refer to point one.btw, you're lucky to even have that extra mpci slot to put it into. On my recent X box, the damn thing is soldered on.
Jan-Lukas Else Probably my next laptop At the moment, I don’t need a new laptop. But should I ever need one (which will probably be someday), it will be the Framework Laptop.It really is the best and most sustainable laptop concept I’ve ever seen. Basically EVERYTHING in this laptop can be replaced. This means that after a few years, you don’t have to look for a new laptop, or replace the weakening battery in a complicated way. No, you can just unscrew the laptop and replace a single component. Be it due to a defect, reaching the …
- James Response to Probably my next laptop At the moment, I don’t need a new laptop. But should I ever need one (which will probably be someday), it will be the Framework Laptop.It really is the best and most sustainable laptop concept I’ve ever seen. Agree 100%. I’ve been looking for excuses to buy one since I’ve heard of them. Buying one would be my first non-Mac since 2003. Maybe once my 2014 mbp dies on me.The only thing that gives me pause is the intel chips and how they compare to the M1 / AMD chips. But who knows how th…
- Jan-Lukas Else Why I bought a new laptop 💻 I just updated my Hardware Uses page. Recently, I bought a new notebook and today I reset my Surface Go and sent it to a trade-in portal. Why? For at least the next two years, I will have two households. One household shared with my girlfriend in her university town, and a second “commuter apartment” (my previous primary residence). So far, I’ve mostly used my desktop PC at home and my Surface Go on the road. When I do some programming, I mostly do it over SSH on my home server anyway. My Sur…