ThinkBook 14 G8+ 21VG

A Bit of Story

I recently bought China market-exclusive Lenovo ThinkBook 14 G8+ IPH 21VG from Taobao. I decided to buy this specific model as I found this model has some features that other recently released models don't have:

As Taobao cannot ship it directly to my country, I need to ship the laptop to Singapore first and then use a forwarder to ship it to me. I ended paying around IDR 3 mio for Singapore tax and the forwarding fee. On top of that the shipment took nearly a month :')

The laptop itself is an efficiency beast. Out of the box it's preloaded with Windows 11 CN edition with no option to change language to English. Thankfully that's not my issue. I wiped the storage and installed Arch, use it 3-4 hours daily and it only need to be charged after the fourth days. Although, I don't run heavy tasks on it, just web browsing, YouTube, and Discord. But still this laptop has impressive battery life compared to my older laptops.

Issue So Far

Hopefully this list won't get any longer :D

BIOS Update from Linux

Step:

7z x SWCN20WW.exe -oSWCN20WW

# run as root
fwupdtool get-devices

# run as root
fwupdtool install-blob WinSWCN20WW.fd ff8eec86ae371279c03ca7b44c91f0e5dbe9d1f2

First restart and update

Second restart and update