T42 screen flickers with lines, goes black or just freezes

[awake724]

My T42 as of last night just started having these problems:
- Screen flickers with vertical lines, or
- Screen goes black, or
- Screen looks normal but freezes up

Either way, I have to reboot it by holding down the power switch to turn if off, wait 20-30 sec and then press power. It boots up fine, but within 5 minutes it'll happen again.

During several attempts at getting it to run, one time I got a blue screen.

What's scary is this all started after my wife was using it and decided to shut down, but closed the lid before it shut down fully so it went into standby while shutting down. When I open the lid an hour after noticing it was still on thinking it was in standby, I got an error message saying "no operating system found". A quick reboot fixed that, was stable for about 2 hours and then all of the above started happening.

Can anyone give me an idea of where to start troubleshooting this? Note: last year I upgraded the HD to 80GB and added more RAM - other than that it's all factory.

Any help would be appreciated, it's frustrating!!

Thanks,

[davidspalding]

Do a complete boot-up and shutdown. What the heck, do two; do one where you boot up to the login screen, then shutdown from there. Do another where you boot up, login, then logout (not shut down), and from the login screen, shut down.

Connect to an external monitor and see if it occurs then. (That is, eliminating that just the screen is going bad.)

Disable the "lid close" action in Power Manager, at least for a while. Until the wife is trained. (My gf is in the habit of "logging out" to the quick user change screen, then hibernating by closing the screen of her own Dell/Gateway clunker. I suggested she shutdown fully once a week. She's still getting used to my T43, with it's fingerprint scan login stuff and specialized OS add-ons.)

Hope that helps..... I've had Windows glitches (like faulty suspend actions, which happened so often that I don't suspend at all), that took 2-3 reboots to clear out.

[lophiomys]

Thats how my T42p behaved when the GPU got loose. In my case it was the classic flexing problem.
see here for more info:
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.ph ... highlight=

[awake724]

Thanks for the advice guys.

So l tried booting up and shutting down several time last night while the T42 sat on a table, ensuring I don't touch it. Works great, did this cycle about 5-6 times.

Then....I booted up, things were good...until I touched the notebook or moved it, which caused the same problems as before.

This leads me to believe it is the GPU problem - is that a safe assessment? If so...my question is:

Can I just replace my motherboard to fix this? If so, do I need to buy anything else aside from the motherboard?

I'm not sure the reflow is an option for me, don't know anyone in Toronto who can do this (that I know of..).

Any advice would be appreciated...want to get this fixed ASAP!

[lophiomys]

I was facing the same questions as you now.
There is no safe assessment unless you are an electronics expert.

Because the mobo was doomed anyway I gave it a try
to reflow it in the convection oven in the kitchen. (see the post by small_thing_on_wax)
It was a hell of work to disassemble and reassemble.
In the end I was lucky and it worked.
If the operation should have failed, I still could have bought a
new mobo assembly or sent it in for repair.

Check the Hardware Maintenance Manual for spare parts and instructions, and read Jamiphar's offering on Reflow.

[awake724]

Just an update - I got a new mobo put in and all the problems are gone!

I found a former IBM tech who does this for a very reasonable price using refurb boards bought from IBM.

Thanks to everyone for you help.