Odd mainboard fault & fix with IBM T20

[Voodle]

A few days ago I got an odd T20 off of ebay so I could steal the memory out of it (since it had 2x 256mb dimms and the price wasnt that high). It's a wreck the screen is smashed, pretty much every piece of the casing has some part broken off and the keyboard is missing the F1 key.
I decided to at least have a go at seeing what state it was in internally since I don't want to keep it, but it was sold to me as working EXCEPT - when I got it, I turned it on and it turned on, showing me a beautiful mess on the LCD - I had to leave fairly soon after so I turned it off and left it.

When I got back later, the thing would NOT turn on, the symptom is one I've not found much detail on outside of "the system board is dead, buy a new one" - which was that when the power button was pressed, the HD light and charge light would flash and there would be no more response than that.
I also noticed that there was yoghurt spilled around the ports on the back, and the ultrabay, so I dismantled it and washed out the casing and ports bit under some hot water then left them to dry for a few hours in the airing cupboard.
Once I put it back together I was very disappointed to find it was doing the same thing again. So I dejectedly put the laptop back together properly and left it.

Now today I decide to take some pictures of it to put it back up on ebay as 'laptop corpse' but to my surprise when I tried to turn it on again it did just that! and now it's been running for several hours quite happily, no locking up, no strangeness. And it still seems to be booting up every time.
There's quite a few variables in this;

- my room is fairly cold right now, it was warmer when it didn't work, so maybe I'll reply tomorrow and say it's dead again

- It could be that it took a few days for the parts I'd washed to dry properly and the HD light flashing is indication of a short

- Some other posts I've read suggest that a capacitor in the laptop can become overcharged, seems like a silly way for a laptop to break but this laptop shouldn't be working so maybe a silly thing like leaving it to discharge properly for a few days fixed it

Has anyone else seen the symptom of the HD light flashing along with the charge light and did it also mean a mainboard replacement for them? It's quite hard to search for such a specific symptom.
I'm still not even sure if it's really fixed, since I've managed to get it to not turn on a couple of times pressing the power button but it's powered up the second time I pressed it...

edit:
Haha I've just managed to reproduce the fault by pressing the power button lightly and quickly several times in a row, maybe it is some kind of protection after all, it'd be quite funny if I rekilled it trying to reproduce the fault
edit more:
And now it's being intermittent after the last session of turning on/off in a row...


Also, I'm hoping that people know more about LCD problems than I do; the LCD currently displays just white on the remaining parts of the LCD that function but there's like 20 different cracks in the glass in there. I've read that the mainboard can also be the cause of displaying just white with the T2x series, so I'm also wondering if it's possible for an LCD to become damaged enough that it only displays white or if it could be that mainboard is still faulty in this way?

[ambientscape]

A few days ago I got an odd T20 off of ebay so I could steal the memory out of it (since it had 2x 256mb dimms and the price wasnt that high). It's a wreck the screen is smashed, pretty much every piece of the casing has some part broken off and the keyboard is missing the F1 key.
I decided to at least have a go at seeing what state it was in internally since I don't want to keep it, but it was sold to me as working EXCEPT - when I got it, I turned it on and it turned on, showing me a beautiful mess on the LCD - I had to leave fairly soon after so I turned it off and left it.

When I got back later, the thing would NOT turn on, the symptom is one I've not found much detail on outside of "the system board is dead, buy a new one" - which was that when the power button was pressed, the HD light and charge light would flash and there would be no more response than that.
I also noticed that there was yoghurt spilled around the ports on the back, and the ultrabay, so I dismantled it and washed out the casing and ports bit under some hot water then left them to dry for a few hours in the airing cupboard.
Once I put it back together I was very disappointed to find it was doing the same thing again. So I dejectedly put the laptop back together properly and left it.

Now today I decide to take some pictures of it to put it back up on ebay as 'laptop corpse' but to my surprise when I tried to turn it on again it did just that! and now it's been running for several hours quite happily, no locking up, no strangeness. And it still seems to be booting up every time.
There's quite a few variables in this;

- my room is fairly cold right now, it was warmer when it didn't work, so maybe I'll reply tomorrow and say it's dead again

- It could be that it took a few days for the parts I'd washed to dry properly and the HD light flashing is indication of a short

- Some other posts I've read suggest that a capacitor in the laptop can become overcharged, seems like a silly way for a laptop to break but this laptop shouldn't be working so maybe a silly thing like leaving it to discharge properly for a few days fixed it

Has anyone else seen the symptom of the HD light flashing along with the charge light and did it also mean a mainboard replacement for them? It's quite hard to search for such a specific symptom.
I'm still not even sure if it's really fixed, since I've managed to get it to not turn on a couple of times pressing the power button but it's powered up the second time I pressed it...

edit:
Haha I've just managed to reproduce the fault by pressing the power button lightly and quickly several times in a row, maybe it is some kind of protection after all, it'd be quite funny if I rekilled it trying to reproduce the fault
edit more:
And now it's being intermittent after the last session of turning on/off in a row...


Also, I'm hoping that people know more about LCD problems than I do; the LCD currently displays just white on the remaining parts of the LCD that function but there's like 20 different cracks in the glass in there. I've read that the mainboard can also be the cause of displaying just white with the T2x series, so I'm also wondering if it's possible for an LCD to become damaged enough that it only displays white or if it could be that mainboard is still faulty in this way?

Yo! Dude.....seems that u found yourself a workable machine eh? Is it still working right now?

[Voodle]

haha nope! looks like I've gone through today's quota of 'workingness', I'm guessing this is some kind of power problem it's still got and now I wish I'd updated the bios and controller stuff before I tried to kill it again.

I certainly dont want to keep this laptop though, I owned a T23 a while ago and don't really want to own another T2x series again.

[Voodle]

http://www.absoluteraleigh.com/blog/arc ... chive.html

This blog has some really interesting (well... sorta) stuff on it, especially if you search for T20, and maybe that capacitor overloading thing has some merit to it after all? Really wish I could find some more info about that.