Thinkpads Forum

Hi i think the display card of my R32 is not working. Does that mean I have to change the whole system board? Is there any get around ?

Thanks in advance.

If it is a bad GPU, system board replacement is needed. What are the symptoms?

Thanks for the reply.

It happend the first time yesterday after I turned on the laptop for a while (around 1.5 hr). The screen faded away and eventually the LCD display became grey in around 10 seconds, and the windows bluescreen with STOP error 0x0000009C appeared (which I googled, seemed to be hardware related issue). I restarted the laptop with an external monitor plugged in and the same problem existed so I believe it is not the LCD problem. I tried again after an hour yesterday and there were no improvement. But today I manage to start the laptop without anyporblem. I didnt keep it on for too long because I dont want the whole system to die again. I suspect it may be smoething to do with heat? Normally I had my laptop turned on for more than 2 hours without any problem.

And after I finished my last message the problem were there again, after which I kept my laptop on for 10 mins.

Download and run mobilemeter for an hour or so of normal use on the machine. What are the average CPU temps?

http://www.softpedia.com/progDownload/M ... 24748.html

http://www.geocities.co.jp/SiliconValley-Oakland/8259/

Thanks.
Only that I cannot get my machine to stay alive for more than 15 mins before it goes down since the first time it died yesterday.
I ran the program you told me to and this time the machine died after around 5 mins and before that, the temparature of the CPU reads 53c.

I take it you have seen this: http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=329284&sd=RMVP
This seems mostly related to a CPU problem rather than a GPU problem.
Take the RAM modules out and clean the contacts with an eraser. Blow off the remnants before reinserting them.

Another thing to try (requires a floppy drive): PC Doctor http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... 43240.html

Thanks for the reply.
Yes I have seen that page, and I tried to pull out the ram and put in another module (my old ram with less capacity) and the problem is still there. Let me try with more serious cleaning and see.

I dont have a FDD but I would try to find one to run PC Doctor. Only that, again it could be a problem that the system dies sooner than I could finish running the program.

Below is a picture I took before the system died last time and this is how the screen looked like. It is pretty random but everytime the screen stuffed up somehow and then died.

http://i42.photobucket.com/albums/e315/ ... G_0097.jpg

I managed to have my laptop turned on for around 30 mins before it went down and I ran some tests with PC Doctor installed in windows that came with the machine.

It passed the following tests
CPU Test, Memory Test, PCI Test, Video Test, AGP Test, CMOS Test.

The system went down half way through while I was running SMART Test / Smart Test - Extended, with estimated time around 45 mins. It didn't show any sign of failing this test though while it was doing some scanning before the screen was stuffed and the system went down again.

Anyway that means, according to PC Doctor, my CPU, video, AGP and Memory are healthy. But the system would still go down within a short period of time after turned on. Would heat be a problem? Could it be that some of the cooling components are not working properly? I ran mobilemeter suggested by Harryc and it read 54c. Is that normal?

Any help / advice is much appreciated. Thanks in advance.