Introduction

today’s article is going to have two topics the first topic is I’m in far over my head when it comes to purchasing the thinkpads and trying to resell them I have a growing pains problem the second part of the article is going to be about does thermal paste actually make a difference does changing the thermal paste actually work is it worth it does it lower the temps does it increase performance what’s the benefit of it and we’re going to jump right into it by having myself explain the story of how we got here

ThinkPad Supplier Trip & Demand Challenges

I went to Tampa to meet a supplier because I have a supply issue with my thinkpads uh as you have seen from the videos I’m now selling thinkpads on the website and I sold all 77 of those thinkpads that I had previously listed I sold in like what it was like 50 minutes or something like that it was something ridiculous I was not expecting that much demand but I went to Tampa to try to figure out if I can get a supplier that will be able to meet the demand that I have right now and it didn’t work out they could not meet the demand but that’s the nature of the business so right now that’s my problem I have a supply problem if you know how to help me with my supply problem then please let me know at purchasing at Salem texts.com and it doesn’t just have to be thinkpads it can be anything it can be latitudes Elite books maybe precisions precisions are nice I just need to be able to buy these laptops in good condition in bulk so I can refurbish them and sell them to you guys for dirt cheap because my goal is to put reliable cheap laptops in the hands of people that would have otherwise bought crappy consumer laptops that will break break in a year because if I can’t fix your unrepairable laptop at least I can prevent that from happening in the first place by selling you one that’s not going to break or if it does break it’ll be easy to repair and cheap to repair

Upgrading T14 ThinkPads & Initial Prep

but today what we’re doing is we are upgrading these uh t14s 512 GB nvmes and all these this one’s ready to go so these all need to be repasted uh dusted off there’s a lot of gu stuck in uh I shouldn’t say a lot of gu it’s it’s minimal levels of gu compared to gaming laptops you freaks speaking of upgrades I like the glasses you like these yeah they’re pretty uh pretty Sleek yeah yeah y so these are these are zules shout out to zul I needed to make my eyeballs run as efficiently as possible and as you’ve seen in my past videos I wear glasses while driving but wearing glasses while driving was not solving my issue I thought my eyes were tired because I didn’t have my uh glasses on all day but it was because I was looking at a monitor all day and that blue light was killing me so I got these bad mm Jam is and they have blue light filters in them but yeah no I like these I think they’re they’re pretty stylish um I got you a pair as well here they are ah all right how do I look I think you look gorgeous ever since wearing zul to block blue light I don’t have eye strain when I’m leaving work after staring at screens for 8 hours straight in fact I didn’t even realize just how bad blue light was until I started blocking it out I thought it was just regular stress from working on laptops with the brightness cranked up but it’s not long-term exposure to Blue Light whether it’s from repairing a laptop or binging a video game is known to have negative effects on your health specifically with your sleep the best way to combat this is with a blue light blocker which is where zul comes in because preventing your precious balls of vision from harmful Rays means less eye strain less stress and more sleep and though the technology to create lenses that do this may be complicated ordering them is simple just go on their website find a pair you like which is easy considering all the stylish frames they have enter in your prescription and boom your ball protectors arrive in no time at all so you can jump right into seeing a clear more comfortable world free of blue light and poor quality all without breaking the bank so do your beautiful Globes of vision of favor and check out zul using the link in my description so thank you zul for these uh fresh specs

Cloning Drives & Test Bench Workflow

so right now what we’re doing is we’re doing a master image uh on one laptop so we’re taking one laptop I think this is it right here that one’s good to go and we are just cloning them with our test bench that is highly sophisticated and by sophisticated I mean we have a single pcie card with a zip tie shout out to Lupe yes and some Velcro with subc crumbs stuck in them so what we did is we bought a quad nvme to pcie adapter so we bought three of them so we can clone 12 drives at once using Clonezilla but that’s super inefficient as you guys in the deployment industry know like those of you that have msps or work for msps and you image hundreds of laptops at the same time you know how inefficient that is so where’s my middle ground I need you guys to help me on that one I’m having growing paints here where is the middle ground for that I’m making it work but it’s costing me so much time at the expense of the channel as you’ve seen like my content has plummeted I don’t think the quality has plummeted but I haven’t been able to push out as much content as I want especially with the short form stuff so I I kind of just need help on that

International Sales & eBay Deployment

the other thing that we’re doing is I bought a bunch of t470 s’s and those are going to be International sales I heard you guys you guys were all complaining that I’m not shipping to your country so I’m going to ship to your country but I’m going to use eBay for that I’m not going to use Shopify with that said every single one of these laptops needs new paste and that’s what we’re going to be doing

Laptop Thermal Paste Replacement Process

these are super easy I guess this can this can here I’m going to get close to you Lupe no all of these laptops need need pacing this one’s probably the worst one that we have so far these are very easy to work on you can see the thermal paste a lot of refurbishes don’t ever change the thermal paste so for these guys you remove the four screws and you cut the tape there there’s a little tape right here and you have to actually twist it that way because see how it’s tucked underneath the heat sink a little so if you just try to pull it up you’ll bend the heat sink so you have to you have to twist it off uh this one’s not too bad actually the Fan’s a little Gucci as is to be expected generally speaking the Lenovo think pads have a really good dust resistant vent design and this is one of them little ball of gu that’s all not too bad especially compared to gaming laptops they also don’t the fan doesn’t spin as hard as gaming laptops too so that’s another reason it’s it’s not as uh not as bad uh uh I just need a toothbrush BL base toothbrush I’m going to go in the trash where I belong and that’s it beautiful right magnifical fans are back in and look at how crusty this is look at this that is crusty Dusty my friend look it that is crusty now if you come here close a lot of people ask about this too you see how this doesn’t have thermal paste on it so this is the they don’t put thermal paste on that because it can actually increase the temperature of the CPU so what they say is that this and I say they I mean Intel it doesn’t get hot enough to require thermal paste and putting thermal paste on there can actually raise your tempts but we are going to put thermal paste on the CPU and we’re going to use amch shout out to amch I’m not going to use PTM on these ones I do use PTM on the more demanding think pads like the P series and like the workstations but this is is almost just as good as PTM

Random Moments & Observations

listen it’s wuang Legends who leave get out you think gold face watches your content no absolutely not ghost face didn’t even know who I was when when we met I didn’t know who I was at that time either I was very uh inebriated that was New Year’s Eve man at the casino that’s two strikes that was fun look at this I just noticed this I noticed this because of my zules wow yeah so it it feels like it’s just adhesive but I’m going to check wow that’s interesting it connects the ethernet port to the computer it has its own little dedicated cable all right so there’s a little little SCH smegma there I don’t know what that is so I’m going to try to just clean it off all right so the SCH smegma is gone but you see a little wear right there I’m going to patch it because it doesn’t look like any any actual contacts are exposed I’m just going to use some Captain tape on there just a little piece of Captain tape thank you beautiful mysterious hand so we’re patched up now if there is any issue with this you know what’s good these come with a one-ear warranty so if there’s any issue they can just return it unless they water damage it the warranty does not cover you messing up your stuff because you’re rough with it or your cat spilled goat milk lotion do you remember the goat milk lotion from the train we were on the Am track and they had goat milk lotion yes I remember and it smells weird yeah that was odd I turned into ashy Harry ashy hary instead of Ashy Larry I don’t know what I would do without you Lupe that’s what she said did she all the girl say that I am very hot she not that hot whose car is this well that was a weird place to respawn good thing they have uh they have barbers in Hell huh fresh cut

Laptop Thermal Paste Debate & Testing

now while I was dead in limbo I saw that there was a video by somebody that said thermal paste does nothing that thermal paste is snake oil and that changing thermal paste is a waste of time it’s a waste of money and that the real reason that the temperatures decline when you do a thermal Pace replacement is because you’re blowing the dust out of the heat sink and not because the thermal Pace has been changed I don’t agree with that so to test this as you can see all these think pads these are t-14 gen 1es right every single one of these think pads there is no dust actually stuck in the vents the vents are completely clean there’s barely any dust in here uh because Lenovo has a good design even this one this is the dustiest one of all there’s no actual clog in here there’s just some stray pubes strewn about so what I’m going to do because I’m doing thermal paste on all of these and I want to justify why I changed the thermal Pace on all these laptops before I sell them so this laptop is completely flat it’s on high performance mode it is a T14 gen one HW info is open as you can see it’s idling internet is off so there’s no internet right now this is it just idling ADC I have cine bench open I’m going to start the multi-core test and I’m just going to open up HW info I’m going to immediately reset it and we’re going to see what the temperature is our score 394 3904 and our average wattage well you know what I’m just going to take a screenshot of this wattage now we are going to close everything down and I’m going to replace thermal paste on this and while I do that I’m going to show you the condition that the laptop is in just so I can show you that the heat sinks aren’t blocked with dust and that any difference in thermals is going to strictly be because of the thermal paste change as you can see there is no dust blocking the heat sink that heat sink is completely clean completely clean no dust gentle scrub a dubdub me and Lupe in a tub that’s our own special video so a nice even thin layer of thermal paste on there and completely clean heat sink think HW info and cinebench R23 okay the computer’s been on for a few minutes just like the other one I didn’t want to influence the result in any way and we’re going to start and we’re going to reset just like we did last time and we wait 3950 and these screenshot it now when we compare it side by side after a repaste we got an additional 177% Max CPU power 12% average CPU power and 177% Max IIA Core Power and though the cine bench scores were only marginally better the point is the computer was able to reach its full potential again simply by repasting and just to drive home this point I did the same thing on two more T4 thinkpads but with i7s instead of i5s as they use more wattage to achieve a higher performance now remember the CPU will always hit its throttle limit when put under a sudden load so the max temp generally isn’t a concern when under load which is why the Max and average wattage is a better indicator of whether the paste actually made a difference and as you can see it made a huge difference in performance because now it’s able to pump out more wattage at the same temps so yes replacing degraded thermal paste does improve performance and is not snake oil and that’s.