T700 & Other updates

First off, I apologise about the lack of updates. I had been busy with my personal life and school and projects are also slower due to lockdowns in China.

T700

First off, I apologise about the lack of updates for the T700 (and the delayed timeline). The Thunderbolt is generally fixed (with some minor caveats) and it’s expected that external GPU and peripherals should work fine. As the Thunderbolt controller is now integrated on-die, most of the driver initialisation lies with the kernel and driver and the firmware only helps to kickstart the process.

Production has also been ongoing. Initial builds are already built and they will be tested thoroughly by hand several times before shipment. Of course, as these are limited productions that are handled by small-time builders, the timeline will be different than what you expect from big-time OEMs. I’ll post more updates once the motherboard arrives.

X2100

I’ve also provided an ISO image of X2100 BIOS updates. It’s based on Intel’s FIT utility and it’s a lot easier than reading through pages of readme just to try to pull off a BIOS update. It’s not the easiest of course but it’s much easier than trying to run complex commands in Linux.

The X2100 continues to be my daily driver and I will provide support for as long as possible. Apart from the motherboard and eDP display cable, every other part of the X2100 is non-proprietary and is documented on my website. You can in fact build the eDP cable yourself as it’s fully documented as well.

Some updates on what I’m doing

I was unresponsive for a while as I got really busy with life. I started a summer internship due to school requirements as an undergrad and that ate into my time quite a bit. I also went back to army due to my conscription obligation. In short, it’s a busy summer.

I’ve also been working on the X270. And yes, I know I work on a lot of random stuff. The CPU of this particular unit is desoldered and changed with an 8th gen chip. However, the BIOS requires modifications as the stock BIOS does not have the 8th gen microcode available. I’ve tried quite a few methods listed online but evidently nothing is working. At this point, I’m looking into just porting coreboot directly onto this laptop instead of hacking around the stock BIOS more. For now, all I got was error beeps, which is a bad sign. If anyone has any ideas on what I can do with the stock BIOS, please let me know. The replaced CPU also replaces the PCH which removes bootguard, enabling me to build an X270 with no bootguard, 8th gen chip and a 13.3″ FHD panel. The ultimate X270.

Leave a Reply