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Review on SMAKN Programmer CH341A Burner EEPROM by Chase Hosea

Revainrating 4 out of 5

Poor quality, will brick your laptop.

I recently received a password protected laptop for free. It's okay, I thought, I'll go through with it. There is just one problem, this flasher is not only low quality, but also it can break your laptop. The first thing I did was do some flash dumps. Both dumps had different checksums. I did a few more dumps. Exactly the same problem. I tried using another laptop with Linux and the Flashroom tool. Exactly the same problem. I unsoldered the pre-soldered wires from my terminal and only used jumpers, thinking it was the length of the cable. Exactly the same problem. When I looked at the underside of the turn signal, I noticed something. It was one of the worst soldering jobs I've ever seen. This is to be expected for ordinary cheap devices, but this is a bios flasher. No problem with that, and here it is to specify a different checksum each time. To make matters worse, one of the USB pins was not properly connected. I then decided to buy a Raspberry PI 3 Model B with a 64-bit quad-core ARMv8-A1.2GHz processor and 1GB RAM and used a few jumpers to flash the BIOS. instead of chips. I did 3 dumps and all are the same. Then I flashed it and what do you know it worked. Don't waste your time and money on this junk, buy a Pi instead.

Pros
  • Everything is fine!
Cons
  • Not bad, but...