Aha! The idea of a chained or connected failure turns out to have been bang on the mark. It is the palmrest trackpad unit at fault. Removing its ribbon connector allows the mouse button on the keyboard trackpoint to work properly. So the two sets of mouse buttons are NOT operationally and logically ...

Now this is weird. T60, recently upgraded from XP to the Win7 release candidate. Left mouse buttons stopped working suddenly. Both of them. Uh, but wait a minute, aren't those on separate cables? Trackpoint mouse buttons on the keyboard cable, trackpad mouse buttons on the palmrest cable? Yes, that'...

I would be surprised if this particular board is even being produced any longer. Any that I have seen have a 2005 date stamp including recent replacements. Brad I'm sure that production of these boards is long since over and done. But if I have the choice between (and can map to an FRU), let us say...

I've got a 15-inch Flexview T42p here that I bought late last year and I just absolutely love it. I find I prefer it to the T60 we also have in the household. However, I was distracted at the time of purchase, and didn't run all of the careful tests that one should do on a secondhand machine. I real...

Ah, okay. PC Wizard does provide one clue: "IBM1A5D", which someone reported in an earlier thread is what their IDtech display is parsed as.

So I'll assume for the moment that's what it is.

Much appreciated!

I've just recently purchased a T42p and a T60. The T42p is a Flexview, and I've been extremely impressed by its performance and contrast and brightness. This even though it is old enough to have the faint lower corner shadowing! The T60 is a let-down by comparison. It's not a Flexview. Pretty dim. I...

I have a 560Z which was operating happily up until the other day. The CMOS battery had conked out, and I got what I immediately recognized as battery error codes on boot, and was dumped to a time-set screen in the BIOS. I had a good battery on hand from another machine, so I opened the failed system...

Here's a link to the 560Z problem. So, maybe it's just a slackware problem, but that is what I use. I concur that the problem is likely to be distro specific. Puppy Linux in its latest iteration has been amazingly compatible. I don't think they make a 366MHZ Mini-cartridge. HP have a part number fo...

On another note. Are you able to boot into Linux? I could never get Linux to work on either my 560X or 560Z without a boot floppy. This problem is well documented (somewhere?). Flawlessly. I set the 560Z to boot from PCMCIA. Put the CF card in a PCMCIA frame adapter in another laptop. Copied the cr...

A friend asked me to assist in reviving a classic TP 560Z. He wanted to see if he could build a completely solid-state unit for field note taking using an IDE-CF adapter. The goal was to stay under $100 (and we are still well under that mark). After some adventures, we got that working, and pretty w...

Okay, I think I have solved this by pure thumbfingered empiricism. What I had done previously when waking the machine was to immediately invoke Fn-F2 after opening the lid or pressing the power button. That did not do the job. But waiting for ten seconds and then invoking Fn-F2 does produce an immed...

Can't figure this one out. TP600X-450, running W2K Pro, most current BIOS, all Windows patches and service packs applied. Going to standby/sleep mode, whether commanded in software via W2K, or by closing the lid of the machine, results in a normal sleep. But when the machine is woken up, either by n...

Following up... I did replace the CCFL. I had said confidently that I would do it "tonight" on the evening I had posted (since Moniserv is a short drive from where I live). It took a *lot* longer than one evening. But it is done. See my entry in the CCFL sticky thread for a description of the challe...

I have just successfully replaced the backlight in my 600X with a LG LP133X5 LCD panel. The matching tube from lcdpart was MS20205 (not MS20275 as stated on their website). Upon opening the panel to perform the replacement I discovered that the failed backlight probably wasn't caused by a faulty tu...

Aha! Here is a new datum. I have a spare display, and spare inverter, and two spare subcards. I played around with various combinations but still got the lagging backlight, or no backlighting at all. Then I remembered that I had... a spare CCFL! I got that and plugged it in to the inverter in the sc...

When the backlight finally does turn on does switching the display to the external video port and back to the LCD panel (i.e. Fn-F7) also cause the backlight to go out for a while? An excellent question! I had not tried that recently, so I did the experiment just now. The backlight does indeed stay...

Okay, I got my unwell 600X back in order, based on feedback here. Thanks, everyone! There is one last issue to troubleshoot. This machine, since I bought it secondhand, has had a screen which is slow to fire up the backlight on boot. I can see the ThinkPad splash screen logo dimly visible, but the b...

Yes, the daughtercard definitely has a stability issue. Almost certainly a cracked trace. Whether that is from overheating or from perhaps being overtightened in its mounts, I can't say. Have put the bad D/C back in to an old 600E board. That displays the same pattern of booting only irregularly, wh...

Curiouser and curiouser, said Alice. So I had opened the case to swap subcards (in addition to the CPU overtemp, this machine has an occasionally dark display). While I was in there, I attempted to boot the machine. The hard drive LED came on continuously upon powerup, and there was no boot and no s...

Okay, the system became bootable again after a few hours of cooling down. I downloaded MobileMeter and installed it. I am not sure how to parse the output of MM, which is very terse, but the topmost temperature reading on its list (which I assume is CPU temp) was 55C by the time I launched the app, ...

Does your fan run normally? By that I mean does it spin faster/louder when you are running a program which takes up a large percentage of the CPU cycles? I do not recall having witnessed that behavior. The fan does appear to be sensitive to long periods of use. After the machine has been on for a f...

Thanks, Ray. I left the unit alone for a few hours and attempted to boot it upon return. Completely nominal memory check, splash screen, normal Win2K boot. System worked beautifully for half an hour and then hung again. A hard power cycle left it again unable to boot. I'll try removing components se...

TP600x here, a 450 unit upgraded to a 650. Has been relatively stable for some time save a minor hassle with a wonky backlight. Was using it about an hour ago in Win2K Pro, when the UI suddenly froze. Mouse pointer disappeared. No response to keyboard. No response to three-finger salute. Closing and...

I had a 600X-450 here which I had been using happily for a while, but the speed bug bit me, and I bought an MMC-2 650Mhz CPU from ebay. I have taken the machine apart before, and so it was pretty routine. Power disconnect, battery out, fan connector disconnect, remove the various items which prevent...

Get a new CMOS battery and try it again. Sensible idea. Done. Has had no effect on the overall situation. I tore the system down to the bare motherboard again and did a slow careful reassembly, to ensure that I had not missed any connectors or grounds. It all seems okay. I grabbed a seven-power opt...

I had mentioned that the 600E which I have been working on had a power connector problem. Assaulted that last night with a meter and a soldering iron. My hypothesis that the solder traces were cracked at the board was wrong: they were solid. There was metallic gummy swarf in the area which I thought...

Got it. It was in fact the lid microswitch. Good thing that I was advised to check it by y'all, because I had already considered and dismissed that as a hypothesis. It seemed odd to me (then, and still does now) that when the switch is sending a CLOSED signal, that the display does not power down 10...

Check the little black switch on the keyboard that acts as a sensor for whether or not the LCD is open. I can't remember the name of it right now. Chances are, the thinkpad thinks that the LCD is closed, which is why it keeps turning off after pressing the FN F7. Switch on the keyboard, hmmmmm. The...

Someone fell over the power connector of my 600E last week and apparently cracked the solder traces where it mates to the motherboard internally. Drat. I opened the unit to see if I could weasel a pencil soldering iron in there. No dice, at least not without further disassembly. Ah, well, it works a...

I've got an owned-since-new 600E here which has been the best single laptop that I have ever owned. It's on its fourth hard drive, but even those have died in a relatively ceremonious and slow and well communicated manner, letting me migrate cleanly and save virtually all disk contents. I think I'm ...