New project folks, I purchased a T42 that does almost nothing. When plugged in with a battery in the slot the battery light lights. With a charged battery nothing happens when pushing startup button, with it plugged in with a good charger nothing happens with or without a battery. There is no fan noise, no beeps, no splash screens, just nothing at all. I removed the battery and HDD and tried holding the start button for the 10 x 10 sec bursts. Should I just bite the bullet and get a new motherboard or are there some fuses that I could look for first.

burns

Remove the RAM and try to power it on.

If it doesn't beep, the board is likely toast.

I'd go a little further and also pull out the MiniPCI (i.e. WiFi) card as well before flinging the motherboard into the trash.

Ray is correct, as usual.

Essentially, remove all the "extra" parts that the machine should be bootable without and give it a shot...

Don't hold your breath, though...

Could be anthing, but it could be an unsoldered southbridge chip. (has this symptom)

But as has been already said, could be anything....

Some progress, all of the suggestions made no difference so I swapped out the motherboard with a tested motherboard from a very reliable source. While I was doing that I plugged the HDD into another T42 and it seemed fine and I let it take the updates to SP3. I put the laptop together and it booted right up after I set the date and time. I got it online with no problems but after a little while I had a cursor freeze up and it seems to happen every few minutes, sometimes while running and sometimes on reboot. I ran memtest on the RAM and removed the wifi card without any improvements. Any ideas where to next? I really don't want to blame this MB as I am sure it was throughly tested.

Try running the machine without the battery and see whether the freezing goes away.

if it doesn't there's likely something wrong with the board...

To eliminate any doubt, boot a "live" Linux disk and watch whether the freezing re-appears.

ajk, will try without battery today, tell me a little more about running off of "live" Linus disk please, I found how to build one using NimbleX but what do I learn by running that way?

Thanks in advance,
burns

Most Linux distros include MemTest86+ for one thing. Probably the most complete RAM testing app there is. Also, by booting a live CD, you will take the HDD and installed OS out of the equation. So, if the machine runs OK off the CD, but freezes when booted from HDD, that will tell you your problems are with the hard drive or something installed on it. If the same problem persists, that tells you to look elsewhere, like something on the motherboard like the CPU fan (could just be overheating), or the Southbridge chip, etc.

Is the Fedora file a good one to use?

Mint Live CD: http://www.linuxmint.com/download.php

Fedora Live CD: http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora

Either / Or works well. Once downloaded make sure you burn the .iso as slow as possible to prevent errors. I use x2 or x4 max for error-free results.

Nick, those sites are so slow or don't even respond, is that typical? ie predicted download times over an hour and nothing seems to happen.

Peter

Suggest trying another mirror since some have low bandwidth- usually takes a couple of tries to find a good one.

I'm working on a T42 for the last 5 year and tried several Linux OS distros. The problem mentioned is very familiar for me and would likely the processor fan which overheads the processor. I've replaced my fan several times and each time it overheads the mouse cursor shocks and fries and the machine becomes very slow.

BTW I work with OPENSUSE for two years both GNOME and KDE versions and it works great.