Just over a year ago I bought myself a Thinkpad Yoga Gen 3 [1]. That is a nice machine and I really enjoyed using it. But a few months ago it started crashing and would often play some music on boot. The music is a diagnostic code that can be interpreted by the Lenovo Android app. Often the music translated to “code 0284 TCG-compliant functionality-related error” which suggests a motherboard problem. So I bought a new motherboard.
The system still crashes with the new motherboard. It seems to only crash when on battery so that indicates that it might be a power issue causing the crashes. I configured the BIOS to disable the TPM and that avoided the TCG messages and tunes on boot but it still crashes.
An additional problem is that the design of the Yoga series is that the keys retract when the system is opened past 180 degrees and when the lid is closed. After the motherboard replacement about half the keys don’t retract which means that they will damage the screen more when the lid is closed (the screen was already damaged from the keys when I bought it).
I think that spending more money on trying to fix this would be a waste. So I’ll use it as a test machine and I might give it to a relative who needs a portable computer to be used when on power only.
For the moment I’m back to the Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 5 [2]. Hopefully the latest kernel changes to zswap and the changes to Chrome to suspend unused tabs will make up for more RAM use in other areas. Currently it seems to be giving decent performance with 8G of RAM and I usually don’t notice any difference from the Yoga Gen 3.
Now I’m considering getting a Thinkpad X1 Carbon Extreme with a 4K display. But they seem a bit expensive at the moment. Currently there’s only one on ebay Australia for $1200ono.
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