Thinkpads Forum

Howdy!

I've recently purchased a T42P and love the machine. However, from the beginning after some use I would get random dead pixels that would appear. I noticed right after selecting shutdown or restart those random dead pixels would go away and the screen would be fine. When the OS starts again, there are none, but after 20mins-1hr at least one appears.

So I restored, updated video drivers, bios, etc....nothing worked. Sent it back to IBM 3Xs... that was a nightmare on it's own. First time around nothing was fixed and the tech broke 2 more things.

Anyhow, they finally replaced it with a new T42P after i went up the chain after the horrible repair services I recieved.

I just setup my OS on the new which I recieved this morning and after 1 hour of being on...THIS ONE is doing the same!!! Got one dead pixel which went away when shutting down and once restarted, but reappears elsewhere after running for alittle.

Is this a known issue bug? Is there a fix for this? Has anyone heard of this before? Or am I just an unlucky soul when it comes to thinkpads?

Sorry for the rant... and I have been called anal, but I don't excpet this from a 3k machine... I don;t think anyone should.

Thanks in advance for any input or insight!
Regards,
Yo Han

That's a bug of the stupid synaptics driver of your touchpad. When you see it, do ctrl+alt+del and kill the program which I don't remember its name (it's the one that you're not aware that its running) and it will be gone, only until when it suddenly wants to show up again.

Thanks for the response! Does IBM not have a fix for this bug? I'm surprised no one knew of it when i called it in about 4Xs to them. Does anyone know the name of the app that runs that causes this? ...and is it a neccessary app or can I remove it.

Thanks in advance!

Yo Han

On my Acer the process is called SynTPEnh.exe. You might experience problems with the scroll functions in certain progams. Give it a try.

If you don't need or like the TouchPad, you can disable it in the BIOS or the ThinkPad Configuration program, then reboot. You will still have use of the TrackPoint (red eraser) and the 3 trackpoint buttons. Your missing pixel will then go missing.

same thing happened twice on my new Thinkpad Z60t, the dot is gone after rebooting. So wierd, I will try to kill the Touchpad program when next time it happens.

Thanks for all the replies. Nexttime it does happen I'll kill that process. unfortunately I do use the touchpad

Hopefully they will have a fix for this bug...just glad it's software related.

Thanks again fellas!
Yo Han

The application is called "Syn Visual Window". And if you carefully point the mouse pointer to the "dead" pixel, pointer icon will turn to trackpoint's scrolling icon.

I contacted an IBM technican for this problem and need to reproduce it with the original image.

I now found out that I can only reproduce it if I use touchpad scrolling (right border of the touchpad) in Firefox. Then the pixel appars and the "Syn Visual Window" in taskmanager. If I close Firefox it stays.

Unfortunately Firefox is not supported by IBM, I may only use software like Norton or Google Desktop search that comes bundled with the notebook

Has anybody found a way to provoke that pixel? Has so far everybody who experiences this used Firefox?

Other posts:
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=23599
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=1953