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:

• Intel's new Panther Lake X7. It has beefy integrated GPU named B390 that have insane performance for an iGPU.
• Removable memory. It even uses LPCAMM2 memory type that also have fast speed comparable to soldered memory.
• Removable storage. I mentioned this here as I actually considered MacBook Air as well that has soldered storage. This model even has 2 M.2 slots :D
• Cheapest model that has all of the above. Actually there is ThinkPad T14 G7 but as always ThinkPad is very expensive on launch and it has soldered Wi-Fi module.

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

• Lack of information and resource: There is very little amount of public information on this model. I cannot find PSREF data and BIOS update for this laptop in Lenovo support site. I asked in Lenovo forum and their support suggested me to find the BIOS update in Lenovo China support site.
• Speaker: In Linux only 2 speakers are functional (left-right down-firing) from 4 total based on marketing material and personal check using metal (left-right up-firing speakers).

Hopefully this list won't get any longer :D

BIOS Update from Linux

Step:

1. Get the BIOS update file from Lenovo China support site. As of this writing it's only provided in Windows' .exe format. In my case the file is SWCN20WW.exe. Although the file is in .exe format, I found an Arch Wiki page that stated we could extract the file using 7zip and use the actual BIOS update file inside.
2. Unpack the .exe file using 7zip.

7z x SWCN20WW.exe -oSWCN20WW

3. Inside the extract directory, find .cap or .fd file. In my case it's WinSWCN20WW.fd. This is the BIOS update file in UEFI update capsule update format.
4. Get "System Firmware" device ID. In my case it's ff8eec86ae371279c03ca7b44c91f0e5dbe9d1f2.

# run as root
fwupdtool get-devices

5. Install the BIOS update. It will prompt to reboot.

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

6. Proceed with the reboot. In my case there will be 2 restarts/"installs".

First restart and update

Second restart and update

7. After the second restart, be prepared to quickly get into BIOS/UEFI settings ("Enter" key) to restore any modified settings as it may be reverted to the default. However in my case the BIOS/UEFI settings are retained.
8. Other article also suggests the UEFI boot entries in NVRAM may be cleared and we need to boot into temporary Linux OS from USB stick and repair the boot entry. However in my case I'm able to boot to systemd-boot and Linux just fine.