HOT TAKE: if you design a laptop with a power supply that looks like this, you should go to jail.

Laptops should be powered by TWO WIRES and the voltage, amperage, and polarity should be WRITTEN ON THE BOTTOM, UNDER PENALTY OF LAW

my fundamental problem is that I'm passionate about changing a lot of things about the computer industry but all of them are things that would need to be changed back in 1989.

EPSON WHY DID YOU NEED FOUR CONNECTORS FOR A TWO CONNECTOR POWER SUPPLY?

@foone You've got my vote for king!

@linuxlizard Monarch or Queen, please!

well I beeped it out and either this is a different connector, or they lied and pin 1 isn't ground, only pin 3 is.

it has been ZERO DAYS since I have had to open up a laptop just to figure out where to shove volts in

I'm not an expert but I don't think the RAM is supposed to do that.

yeah I've not seen this kind of RAM module before. some kind of Epsom custom thing, maybe?

AH-HA! that was the wrong manual. They DID change the pinout!

Thankfully, it's compatible.

how long has it been since you've had to straighten the pins on your RAM chips?

Because for me it's "today", but I imagine for everyone else it's either "never" or "when I tried to upgrade my IBM 5150 PC" or "I had one of those computers with ZIP RAM"

@foone what about usb-c?

@foone That wasn't uncommon on early laptops, everyone had their own form factor. Toshiba had a different module for every blasted laptop model. Infuriating when you want to upgrade your Satellite or Libretto, even when they were new.

yeah this RAM module uses a 44-pin (2mm pitch?) connector.

That's great if you want it to be possible to accidentally plug your hard drive into your RAM slot or vice versa! Normally that's not remotely possible for so many reasons.

@luana unfortunately, I live in The Past, where such things are yet to be invented.

I seriously can't think of any era of PC hardware where that was even remotely possible, for physical connector reasons.

You could use the same connector for both RAM and hard drives back in the early PC era with HardCards and RAM upgrade ISA cards, but that wasn't really a case of mixing up the connectors: they just both plugged in the same generic place.

THE PINOUT IS FOR THE POWER CABLE

NOT THE POWER CONNECTOR ON THE LAPTOP

meaning:
1. it's mirrored
2. I may have just reverse-volted it and let the magic smoke out

yeah, I borrowed someone who has... nosmia? Whatever the term for "has a sense of smell" is. It's got Magic Smoke Stank now.

@foone it's going to be a deep, neurotic joy when you find out only 2 of those pins are actually being used

Pulled everything out. It's a small computer! This is everything but the keyboard, hard drive, floppy drive, and screen.