Static Buldup?

[invictus]

About a month or two ago a remote user for where I work had issues with his T43 (2686-DJU) and what was happening is that when he goes to power up the laptop, the battery and power lights are on but nothing happens.

I had called IBM/Lenovo's Service Desk and they suggested to reseat the memory under the keyboard and to do the power cycle (have battery removed and AC adapter unplugged from laptop, press the on/off button 10 times and on the 11th leave it pressed in for 30 seconds). After reinstalling the battery and plugging in the AC adapter to the laptop it started to boot and all was well until a few weeks ago. The laptop had the same issues as before, and I then did the power cycle again and it fixed the issue again.

I called the Service Desk and explained what's happening and was wondering if the systemboard could be going bad. The tech had me run the diagnostic tool located in the R&R and everything passed. The tech then mentioned that this sometimes happens during the winter months and what's happening is that the laptop has a static charge and that is what's causing the laptop to not start when powering up.

Is this really true, or is the IBM tech feeding me a line? It sounds reasonable to me, but my boss thinks it's BS...


Jon

[kam_]

I've had similar problems, except it just won't power up at all - no lights, nothing.

At first the power button trick would work, then it wouldn't. It just randomely works after removing the battery for anywhere from 30 seconds to 6 hours!

They decided they need to replace the system board, but i don't have the time to send it in right now. It still works *kinda*, and I have almost a full 3 years left on the waranty.

My advice would be to get it repaired. If you're short on waranty get it done ASAP! You can bet that if they're planning to replace my system board under waranty, they'll suggest the same for you, and out of waranty that could be very expensive.

[christopher_wolf]

I had an old HP ze5170 that did that; problems can range anywhere from several bad caps on the mobo, bad mobo overall, or simply very old firmware on the BIOS encountering a new low level device that cannot be handled.

My T43 has gotten static shocks (charged enough to make me wince for quite awhile), has exhibited no problems and has . The charge gets distributed throughout the shell of the Thinkpad and ally portions of the chassis. Think of lighting shocking a car. The net charge in a conductor is zero, unless it finds a way to ground to sensitive devices in which case you might have a problem.

My old HP ze5170 had to sit for about a week to be able to boot; so it is possible that excess charge as to leak off, but that should only be valid in the case of static buildup and a bad cap.

[Kyocera]

It's been stated here before, but rather than find the post i'll just restate it:

press the power button 100 times, on the 100th time hold it down for one day. HTH

[kam_]

100 times? now you tell me!

I understand about the static, and its only really relevant when the charger is plugged in because you have a real route to ground. Having said that tho, the static will be grounded corectly anyway. The sheilding around the circuit board creates a farady cage, so its not lilkly that static will find its way in unless your finger breaks that cage. That would require your finger being closes to the circuit board than any other part of the sheilding.

Static has been used as an excuse for bad RF performance, generaly poor circuit design and intermittant component failure since the dawn of time.. i'm pretty sure its a software problem (in the sense that some embedded chip fails to initialise, like the BIOS) or a hardware problem.