well, here's a wacky one.

[fred@social.fthevenet.eu]

@davidgerard imagine that: Lenovo building an entire data center entirely out of stolen parts from serviced laptops! It's genius!  Not even Scam Altman would have thought of that one!

[resuna@ohai.social]

@davidgerard

I always downgrade equipment to the status I received it when I send it in for repair. Back in my sysop days we had several systems revert to shipping configuration over the years.

[davidgerard@circumstances.run]

@resuna i didn't add a thing to this laptop though!

[reflex@retrogaming.social]

@davidgerard @resuna Do you have the original order record? It should record that. How about the box it came in?

[davidgerard@circumstances.run]

@reflex @resuna nuh, was a company laptop. I can ask them to pull the original purchase record.

[brib@disabled.social]

@davidgerard That sounds awful and very illegal

(they say, knowing that shameless companies never care about what's illegal if it suits them)

[laventeot@wien.rocks]

@davidgerard What was the failure that needed repair? Did you get back a repaired laptop or a replacement?
In other words, do this looks intentional (either by the organization or employee theft) or could this be accidental?
I'll mention the adventure to my social circles and advise that anyone needing to send back a laptop for repair add a post-it saying "I have records if you steal my RAM you will get caught"

[clickhere@mastodon.ie]

@davidgerard wtf!? Are they taking - can they take? - *memory from devices* for data centres? At least, that's where my mind immediately went. Is that where we're at??

[piraat@mastodon.social]

@clickhere @davidgerard

No, but consumer grade RAM is becoming more valuable due to production being* syphoned into data centre grade RAM.

*future tense, the price rises are mostly market speculation currently.

[0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange]

@davidgerard man, when I posted the first warning signs I heard about this, a lot of people didn’t believe it could really be happening. But I certainly believe you that you know how many GB your laptop had before repair. This is #%^* dire. https://infosec.exchange/@0xabad1dea/115768580439044230

[rotopenguin@mastodon.social]

@clickhere @davidgerard Nature, ahh, finds a way.

[jae@mastodon.bsd.cafe]

@davidgerard no, i've been a lenovo enterprise customer for 7 years, never one issue. i've only had to send one machine back for a faulty psu, but it came back as it was supposed to.

other repairs throughout the years were done by the on-prem techs who swap parts out on the fly. so far no issues.

hope you can get it resolved. doesn't sound like a normal occurrence, but still unfortunate

[evey@chaos.social]

@davidgerard https://support.lenovo.com/ should be able to pull up the ass build specifications based on the serial number. And in a warrenty situation it does make sense that they will rebuild it as the specifications internally have stated. So any consumer upgrades after the fact can get messed up.

[oxyhyxo@mastodon.bsd.cafe]

@0xabad1dea @davidgerard if this is the case the practice making its way to someone as large as Lenovo is extremely worrying

[neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk]

@davidgerard Oof.

[stonebear2@hachyderm.io]

@0xabad1dea

Sweet cheez wiz on wonder bread.

@davidgerard@circumstances.run

[drizzy@cyberplace.social]

@davidgerard What does https://pcsupport.lenovo.com say? If you have your laptop serial number you can look up exact parts that are in it.

It includes full warranty history and tons of additional helpful stuff. I can't imagine they'd be able to mess with that record easily.

[nazokiyoubinbou@urusai.social]

@piraat @clickhere @davidgerard I think it's much more likely they either tested and found bad RAM and swapped it to less out of cheapness or just imaged the system and swapped the hardware but didn't exactly match it. Whether they swapped to a lesser one on purpose or not I couldn't say, but if they did it was probably just out of cheapness.

[sef@social.coop]

@davidgerard repairability=scavengeability

[pholostan@chaos.social]

@davidgerard Did you even get the same machine back? They could have sent you the wrong machine, and that one comes with 16.