T43P w. strange/intermittent charging behavior

[JoeM]

I received a new T43P last week and am very happy with it....except it behaves strange during the last two days when trying to charge the battery. I was running the laptop on battery when I was told to plug in the AC adapter at remaining ~10% of battery. I did so, the notebook started charging until somewhere around ~30%. The icon for AC-power (eventhough still plugged in) disappeared and it ran of the battery. Shutting down and rebooting, plugging the power supply in and out didn't help. The power supply was noticeably hot. Later that day it worked again without any hassle. The notebook ran on fullspeed during that session.
Today the same. Battery was nearly empty, I plugged in the AC adapter. It started charging until it suddenly stopped again. This time I had a DC-meter at hand to check if the powersupply is actually the weak link. And it showed no reading. Again it was noticably hot. I put the powersupply in the freezer for 10 minutes, it worked right away after that and is still charging.

Long story, easy questions:

- Does the power supply have some sort of thermal fuse that gets triggered if the battery is being charged and the notebook used on full power at the same time?
- The powersupply says 16V/4,5A which leads me to say it is a 72W one, aren't these sufficient to charge and power the notebook at the same time?
- Did anybody else ever experience anything like that?

I hope to not have received a crappy unit which is full of bugs, I would hate to let that one leave my hands.




TIA.

[JoeM]

IBM Tech support finally called me back. A new powersupply is on its way. I was told that the supply has no thermal fuse. What could have caused it are tiny material defects that expand due to heat and result in a failure. When cooling off, the problem disappears as if nothing happened.

Hopefully that'll be the last time the support line is needed.

[tehsoul]

actually this happened to me once, just stopped working and it was too hot to touch. after it cooled down it worked perfectly again