My T21 is having some issues after a long illness. The backlight was not coming on and I eventually diagnosed it down to the LCD cable. Before I got there, though, there was a suddenly-dead-battery incident. One day I powered her on and the screen was kind-of working but she got hotter than usual, and my good battery pack (usually up for 1 1/2 hours) ran out in 4 minutes.

No problem, ran on AC to finish the task at hand, after which I replaced the offending LCD cable, and now all is well with the backlight and operating temps seem normal.

So, the issue now is the battery light flashes yellow whenever I have a battery plugged in, and there's no charging of battery happening. The power management utility has this to say about the battery "Power State: On line, Critical". Which says naught plus or minus.

It does this with my formerly good battery pack, and also with a replacement generic battery pack. Seems unlikely they're both suddenly bad. I'm thinking that maybe the bad cable was shorting some amps and smoked something important. Could it be, say, the charging circuit on mobo, or better yet, something cheap and easy to fix? Any ideas appreciated.

Thanks, -BrianJ

This same issue happened to me today.......I walked up to my T-21 after coming home from work and saw the battery light flashing yellow......it has a brand new battery only one week old and was at 99% charge when I shut it down the night before. So I removed the power cord and the battery, then held the Power On button down for a few seconds and reconnected both power sources. That did the trick. I believe this issue is caused by a conflict between software/OS and bios power management options/settings. Do not forget the T-21 was engineered back in the Win98 days, the IBM site has a few fixes for the more current OS not to mention tweaked Windows drivers. Above all, if you are going to use the IBM Power Management Wizard program, disable all power options in bios.

Thanks for the advice. I gave it a try, but no change

Have you tried the old standby method of pressing the power button 10 times, and on the tenth time hold it for about 10 seconds? This drains/clears the capacitors.