Need a help

[StevenShelby]

Hello

I just recently got a t42 and its been working great until yesterday when all of the sudden it started having blackouts at random intervals. At first I thought it must be a screen problem so I tried connecting it to a secondary moniter, but when I did this I had the same issue. It blacked out on the secondary screen shortly after booting up also. It also will blackout when I move it or when I close it and open it again or when I try to run a movie or play a game. Any help would be great.

[RealBlackStuff]

Either the GPU or the Southbridge needs to be reballed/reflowed.
You can thank the RoHS idiots for that with their bad fantasies about lead-free solder.
Some people managed to 'bake' the motherboard in their oven and get another couple of days/weeks/months out of it, but they all fail again.
Getting another motherboard is the easy way out.

[CreeperLoop]

For T4x Series, the reliability of solder for those large BGA chips (South Bridge, GPU, etc. ) could be a problem...In general T43 could have less risk to have alternative cases, as Lenovo/IBM improved the soldering quality on them. But actually, the main causes of those problems is that the bottom cases of those T4x s are not strong enough so the motherboard itself may get (a bit) FLEXED when using single hand to hold it, and it could lead to the soldering issue overtime.

The successor T6x series solved the issue as they built those machines very tough with even more metal frames...

Replace the motherboard is a good choice...But most importantly, always hold those T4x s with both of your hands!