Do you have a Wistron laptop? What about Compal? If you have a notebook computer, the chances that it was made by those or another one of the top 5 ODM/OEM manufacturers, which also include Quanta, Inventec and Asus, is pretty high. A quick survey among the notebooks in the near vicinity revealed that many of them were actually Quanta, Compal, Wistron, Uniwill, Mitac or Clevo machines. Some ways to find out where yours came from is, in Linux:
- Check system, base board or chassis manufacturer DMI data with dmidecode. For instance, a Positivo V44 shows “Manufacturer: CLEVO Co.” and “Product Name: M550SE/M660SE”. But Compal-made HPs can have this marked as “Manufacturer: Hewlett-Packard”.
- See PCI subsystem vendor IDs with lspci -vv. The aforementioned Positivo machine shows “CLEVO/KAPOK Computer”. A Positivo D35 shows “Uniwill Computer Corp”. The HPs and Acers I examined list subdevices as their own.
- See the vendor ID in the first three octets of the ethernet interface MAC address. Some HP machines have “00:16:D4″ which means Compal Communications. An Acer Aspire 3620 has a Wistron ID in its ethernet interface.
So far my LG LW20 seems to be designed and manufactured by LG itself, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it comes from somewhere else (notebooks and hot dog sausages, nobody really knows what they’re made of).
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July 31st, 2007 at 4:43 pm
My Lenovo seems to identify pretty consistently as Lenovo…
July 31st, 2007 at 5:10 pm
I think Lenovos are genuinely Lenovo machines, even in the time they were IBMs.
July 31st, 2007 at 7:52 pm
Regretable .. but yes .. It happened to me .. I had a Toshiba P15-S479 (the one that I took to the Conectiva Labs the day I payed a visit if you can remember) that turned out to be a Compal Machine ..
I found out thanks to Linux .. and to the fact that the toshiba_acpi module wouldn’t load. After a rather short research, and an e-mail from a clamav devel (if I remember correctly) that had bought a Tecra notebook only to find out that it was not only not manufactured, but not even designed by Toshiba but Compal, I came across the “omnibook” kernel module ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/omke/ now http://sourceforge.net/projects/omnibook/) .. take a look at the list of supported machines and oops … there you go .. half of the notebooks that you pay for good (whether they are Acer, HP, Toshiba, etc,), turn out to be “el cheapo” notebooks, branded by “I ain’t buying crap from you again” corporations =)
http://omnibook.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/omnibook/omnibook/trunk/misc/dmi_strings.txt?revision=255&view=markup
Have fun!
July 31st, 2007 at 8:05 pm
yup .. I did remember correctly … It was Tomasz Kojm from Clamav …
Here’s the mail I was talking about: http://linux.toshiba-dme.co.jp/ML/tlinux-users/6900/6903.html
See ya !
July 31st, 2007 at 9:08 pm
Hello Gonzalo, of course I remember… Well, I don’t know about the build quality of that specific Compal machine, but I’ve seen some OEM Uniwill and MSI systems that are that looked quite acceptable. The Compal HPs I’ve seen are cheap notebooks so I didn’t really expect them to be very solid, I think every manufacturer has products in different build quality levels. In fact I’d expect the big companies like Toshiba (or Acer, HP, etc.) to design their machines and leave production to the Taiwanese/Chinese companies instead of rebranding an existing product, but it seems that it’s not always the case. And I think something similar happens in the cell phone and digital camera markets as well.
July 31st, 2007 at 9:48 pm
Most likely …
Chinese products are all over the place .. especially (regretably?) around south america … The problem for me (just as it seemed to be for Tomasz) is that when you find out , you feel you’ve been riped off ..
All in all .. you can let a cell phone (mine is a brazilean Samsung and it rules!) or almost any other similarly priced gadget go … but after you laid down your hard earn sixteen hundred (or so) bucks to buy piece of hardware on which the _brand_ makes a difference (I believe we can all pretty much agree that buying a compaq or a “el cheapo” is not the same as buying a Toshiba or an IBM), believe me .. you feel you’ve been scammed … and I don’t mean “morally” scammed .. I mean scammed like in criminal law …
I bought a Toshiba .. Toshiba gave a Compal .. but they charged me with a Toshiba … and, had I know that before buying, I woul’ve never purchased that product.
Anyways … no more cookies for Toshiba from me .. ;)
Oh .. btw, I almost forgot .. I never investigated much on other machines .. but regarding Toshibas, the basic rule of thumb was “If it has a Phoenix BIOS, its (most likely) not manufactured by Toshiba (even if it is branded by Toshiba) .. so .. don’t buy it! ” you may add that to the list of “Ways to know if you notebook manufacturer screwed you!”
[]’s !
August 1st, 2007 at 3:34 am
Sorry, guys, but you seem to be so naive!
Of course Lenovo/Legend is made by Lenovo/Legend, because ThinkPads were always made by Lenovo/Legend! (IBM has never made a notebook, they only marketed it.)
Compal… some years ago, Compal use to made ~50% of the world’s notebooks! C’est le secret de Polichinelle…
And you’re wrong about Compal and HP Omnibook. My 7-yr old Omnibook XE3 manufactured in 2000 by Compal is rock-solid (except for the battery), it was very heavily used, it had hundreds and hundreds of distro installs, and let me tell you its keayboard is better than ALL the keyboards you can buy nowadays (possibly with the exception of a ThinkPad)!
110% reliability, that was Compal. I can’t tell for current models, but…
I know from day zero that my HP was made by Compal:
(1) The original box that encompassed the “box with handle” had a label that said it was shipped from Compal.
(2) The battery has Compal as a string in its identification.
You should buy original boxes that have never been open (e.g. from serious online stores), and you should find a label saying from which Chinese or Taiwanese factory it was shipped to you!
Guess what? My latest Acer TravelMate 5310-300508 seems to have been manufactured by someone else (I don’t know that Chinese name, I have to look again at the label on the external box), and the Broadcom wireless BCM94311 identifies itself as Dell Wireless 1390.
Get used with the globalization. Everything is made in China. Even your coffin will be made in China!
August 1st, 2007 at 3:36 am
CORRECTION to “from which Chinese or Taiwanese factory it was shipped to you!”
Should read: shipped to the importer or wholesaler, who forwarded it to the retailer, who shipped it to you.
August 1st, 2007 at 9:07 am
I think Gonzalo’s point is the difference between an original design manufactured by these companies and a rebranded OEM machine. Compal and Quanta HPs, for instance, seem to fall in the former category since many internal components identify themselves as HP. It would be the case of a Quanta or Asus-made iBook/MacBook as well. Now there’s the situation where a complete, previously existing system is just rebranded and the brand company is little more than an endorser and reseller.
August 1st, 2007 at 10:13 am
Exactly … I paid for a rabbit .. they gave me a cat …
August 1st, 2007 at 11:28 am
My acer has “Subsystem: Acer Incorporated [ALI] Unknown device 006a”
:)
August 1st, 2007 at 12:09 pm
You may want to check the vendor ID in the ethernet mac address. I believe Acer designs their systems, but contract manufacturing is likely to be carried by Quanta, Compal or Wistron.