Bend Over, Art!

[ArtShapiro]

I don't know why I cared, but I looked up at my ancient T20 - my very first laptop - covered with dust on the top shelf of my headboard, and decided to power it up. In its day, I was thrilled to have it as I could now enjoy the NY Times crossword puzzle during my weekend coffee shop visits.

I noticed it was missing a hard drive, but the caddy, screws, and cover were sitting right there.

The machine booted up to the BIOS, and I was able to correct the date and time. I was surprised the CMOS battery was apparently good. I took out my stack of parallel 2.5" drives and started trying them. Most wouldn't boot or reported the disk was bad (I'm suspicious). Finally I found a 6GB, 4200 RPM drive and it turned out to be a Win2000 SP3 disk, doubtlessly the original for that machine, which booted up fine.

To my surprise, everything was functional except the networking, which gave a yellow exclamation point. The virus definitions were dated August 28, 2002! I went into Windows Update and, not even being able to determine which network adapter was built into the motherboard, I started trying various 3com and Intel drivers. Most wouldn't install, reporting the hardware was incompatible. Several installed but then reported that the NIC failed to initiate. Finally, I found one that worked and I actually had wired networking. I found a source for Win2000 SP4 - it wasn't even available from Microsoft with my MSDN account - and downloaded and installed it. That finished up the evening.

The next day I decided to update the Symantec virus definitions, only 11 1/2 years out of date. They started to download. A few minutes later, the machine simply shut down.

And there I was - it turned out that after all that work the motherboard decided it was time to hit me with the infamous Blink of Death.

I'd fixed that once before on a T23, after totally disassembling it and finding one of the inductors sitting in the bottom of the case. With my wretchedly aging eyes, doing the requisite micro-soldering was quite an ordeal, but the T23 had sprung to life.

I'm not sure I want to go through that grief with a T20 and its maxed-out half gig of memory. Guess this guy will be headed to the county's electronics recycling facility, unless I can come up with some reason why I'd want to go through the iffy process of pulling it apart and hoping that it's a similarly loose surface-mounted component. I thought that the inductor issue was primarily for T23s, and that it could be almost anything on the earlier models.

Oh well, it kept me occupied for a few hours.

Art

[rkawakami]

The Blink of Death is not caused by the same inductor issue in the T23. When one (or both) of the bottom-side inductors gets disconnected from the motherboard, the system could still power on to some extent. Typically, the fan surges in speed. With the T20-T22 Blink of Death, all you get when you press the power button is a tiny flash from the hard drive LED. If that's the case, then the system could still boot in the future; that's the iffy nature of that particular problem.

My guess, from the age of the system and your description that it turned off by itself, is that it overheated and shut off via one of the thermal sensors. All it may take would be to remove the heatsink/fan assembly and apply some new thermal grease (and verify that the fan still spins freely).

[ArtShapiro]

All it may take would be to remove the heatsink/fan assembly and apply some new thermal grease (and verify that the fan still spins freely).

Thanks for the input, Ray, but after being stone cold for a day it only runs for either a second or, at most, a few seconds into the boot process. Those ancient CPUs wouldn't heat up THAT fast, would they?


Art

[rkawakami]

No, possibly not. It sounds like another type of power problem then. Is the fan spinning at all?

However, if it does stay on for more than a second or two, then it's not the traditional BoD. A true BoD will not show anything other than the wink of the LED.

Just a thought... pull the MiniPCI card out. It's behind the square panel towards the middle of the bottom. I've seen some weird problems with T2x systems when that card goes bad.

[ArtShapiro]

Just a thought... pull the MiniPCI card out. It's behind the square panel towards the middle of the bottom. I've seen some weird problems with T2x systems when that card goes bad.

Sacre Bleu!

I'd long had that failure mode fade from memory. The machine is up and running. Many thanks.

Now to see if I retained any of those cards in my numerous junk boxes. Otherwise, I have both a wired and wireless USB Nic somewhere, which will probably redefine "dismal" on that ancient USB 1.1 machine. But it will be better than nothing.

Art