ThinkPad T43p Power issue affects the display and system

[rmj.it]

Currently Running a ThinkPad T43p
Specs:
2.13GHz Processor
2.00GB RAM
Windows XP

My Problem:

Whenever I pull AC Power and run on battery power the display and the whole systems just freezes. The screen goes all grainy and distorted. Whenever it's on AC power it works just fine. I've tried different batteries and that's not the solution. I've tried the hard drive in other T43p's but it will not start-up partly due to the fact we rolled back the bios on the current system.


Now a few things to also consider when reading this, due to some Hard drives I've received, we have had to roll back the bios on this machine in order to fully utilize the hard drive.

The Hard Drive I'm using is a Samsung HM160HC, which isn't rated for a T43p, but in order to make it work, we had to roll back the bios, the bios version is at 1.04 currently. The reason we rolled it back because we were receiving an Error 2010 message on start-up. We've bypassed this message with the rollback, but now we're getting the power issue which freezes up the system.


Recap:

Pull AC Power and run on battery the T43p freezes, try to plug back in but will not correct the problem, so need to hard shutdown.


Any ideas, suggestions, and comments are welcomed.

[RealBlackStuff]

Welcome to the forum.
Update the BIOS and ECP to the latest version.
That version will have an automatic bypass option for the 2010 error. It will still (and only) show at cold boot, but continue to boot after a few seconds. There are no other side effects. Live with it!

[rmj.it]

Well I would be fine with living with it personally.

The thing is I work for a IT company and this happens to be one of the things we do as in refurbish laptops, but the boss says to make it go away, so that's what I aim for.

Although, I will try the bios upgrade thing on another systems and test it out.

Thanks for the tip.



Any other ideas, suggestions, or comments on OP, are welcomed still.


Thanks.

[RealBlackStuff]

If you have some spare time, read the 'Sticky' on non-approved HDs for T43s: http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=11059
Also read the Think-wiki about this: http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Problem_w ... hard_disks
If you can find some approved hard disks, you'd be fine (and your boss happy).

[rmj.it]

New Development:

Well we fully loaded a new system on a new T43p, I rolled back the bios to v1.02 and it works fine with the Samsung HDD I mentioned earlier.

Now, we've been tooling around with the T43p that had the problem, it appears the be the Display Driver that's on the machine, we're still currently researching and testing it more.


So, the conclusion so far is, that it appears to be isolated to the specific laptop itself with the updated display drivers.

[ajkula66]

Well, by rolling the BIOS back to 1.02 you've affected the GPU as well as the fan operation...not a good idea IMHO...