Bought a broken laptop, and fixed it mostly by luck.

I won the ebay bidding war at 100€ +p&p for a Thinkpad p14s gen 1 with broken graphics and/or screen.

No ssd (but I have a 256GB spare) and 32GB ram and a hub.

After tinkering yesterday (sometimes it'd boot, all up to a linux on a usb stick before freezing, sometimes not at all) I let it be and continued today. Screen totally black, not a sign except the fan spinning for a second or two at power. No sign on the external screen. Nothing to do it seemed. So I opened it, removed the battery and ran on usb power. No change. Removed the 16GB (the other 16GB is soldered) and lo and behold, it's the ram socket!

So I'm a happy laptop user now 😁!