Hello to everyone! I am new here.

I feel that my machine has a terrible problem.....what happens is that I switch it on, and at different intervals (each time) after switching on the machine clicks, the screen goes black. All the lights keep flashing whilst the clicking within the machine continues and the screen stays black. At this time it is almost impossible to switch it off without removing the battery and removing the power cable also.

I do not know what to DO! Is it software or power?

I really do not want to throw my old trust faithful T20 away, it has been wonderful and trusted over the years....HELP!

Hi and welcome to the forum

Sorry to hear about your friend; but before we can help could we need more specific data about your system. What OS are you running, how much ram do you have installed, what modifications (if any) have you made to it?

I'm not that savvy on the T20 quirks, but trust me...the wealth of experience contained in this forum is encouraging. If you haven't done so already search the forum ad nauseum you might find some answers there

Good luck!

Welcome to the forum, Aba!

The step would be to recommend as many peripherals as you can. (ie. all but one stick of ram, hard drive, CD drive, Mini-PCI card, CDC card, etc.) Try it with just one stick of ram, and if you can get into the BIOS, try adding another stick of ram, then Cd drive, and so on, until you determine whether or not one of these peripherals is causing the problem. At this point, I am thinking that it is either the hard drive, or the CDC/Mini-PCI card.

What tfflivemb2 meant was to remove as many peripherals as possible. I would try removing the Ethernet adapter/MiniPCI adapter first. This is the one that is the most problematic. I would also recommend to get the Hardware Maintenance Manual to help with disassembly.

+1 on the miniPCI adapter. I've had problems with it and faulty card makes ThinkPad not to POST.