As Lenovo manufactured ThinkSmart Hub 500 as meeting room device for Microsoft Teams and Zoom and with good quality and design, back in last year our office has placed order to purchased 5 of that devices also come with some Logitech high-end webcam for our conference room. With a nearly 1 year around work with that meeting room device it is really good for small to mid-range of conference room. But also it had some down side to us as IT tech.
Recently, one of the ThinkSmart Hub 500 device start getting crazy…suddenly automatically boot into Windows 10 Recovery mode without any error and when you try to reboot it the Teams App it does not show up any button just a blank screen, and try to login to Administrator account to perform some checks you when open the Settings app it just always crash.
First off, my colleague try to reset the whole system and re-configure it but after few days the issue just came back.. Then I told my colleague to call Lenovo customer service to do a onsite check, when they come to the office their just did a basic check and using their OS to performed a clean-install to that device but still the same. (Why just re-image the system after a basic check??)
After the 2 times re-image the system with the same issue remain, I try to do a troubleshoot on my own:
- Take off the machine from the conference room and unplug other cable
- Boot up the device and press F10 go Lenovo Diagnostics
- Run a fully test with all hardware (around 180mins)
Then I found the root cause where it came from… See below photo:
So this issue it is from hardware level and with two of Samsung RAM. Then I called the Lenovo customer service to carry 2 of RAM to do a onsite replacement. Finally, after the replacement I performed the fully test again with the build-in Lenovo Diagnostics all good and the system is running well.
It’s hard to say why the RAM will had that issue but from the whole machine design perspective the RAM should not be paced at the bottom which makes it hard to cool down and maintain. (The Lenovo guy take like one hour 30min to teardown the machine just for RAM)
Wish Lenovo improve the future MS Teams meeting device as Teams continue to update with new feature the device should be more reliable and easy to maintenance.
