Thinkpad T21 crashes randomly

[strekship]

At random, my T21's screen goes blank, and the hard drive slows down then revs up. All of the lights are on, but i can't do anything. Somtimes when i restart it, the computer keeps turning off and on. If i leave it for about five minutes then turn it on it seems to work fine. Any ideas?

[BarkingPerci]

You know - not relating it to anything T2x specific that sounds to me like an overheating issue. Can you check to make sure you exhaust fan is working? What you describe sounds like the symptoms of an overheating PC - perhaps you need to replace the fan?

If it's not that I just hope you don't have a more serious problem (although overheating can cause damage so shut it off if it happens - or try to cool it down via other means)

[strekship]

My temps never go above 70c. It crashes somtimes when it reports 50c. I recently applied some AS5 to my cpu because i thought it might be a heat issue. I am starting to think that i might be experianceing the start of the bad cap issue that seems to be common wit hthe T2x series. Is there aw ay i can manually control my fan? I ran diagnostics with the pc doctor boot disks and every thing passes.

[rkawakami]

Couple of questions:

1) Are you running the laptop from the AC adapter only, the AC adapter with a battery installed or just a battery only? The symptoms you describe could be a power issue and not something directly related to a high temperature. That would be my first guess at this point.

2) When the screen goes blank and the hard drive spins down and then up, you say "you can't do anything". I'm assuming you mean the screen stays off (i.e. the backlight is off) and you have only tried turning the system off with the power button. Have you tried a "three-finger salute" (Ctrl-Alt-Del) to see if the system can re-boot?

3) What is the nature of the next operating system startup after one of these lock-ups? I assume again you are using a recent version of Windows (i.e. XP or 2000) and not something as ancient as Win98. Do you get a message to the effect that the system was not shut down properly and given a chance to boot into Safe Mode?

4) PC Doctor has an option in which you can set a "pass count". In most (all?) of the individual diagnostic tests, you can press the F2 key to pop-up a Test Options window. Change the Set Pass Count number to 50 or 100 and the tests you have selected will be repeated that many times. Quite useful to use in order to burn in the system for several minutes. Since your problem seems to be a systemic one, and if you are indeed having a problem with an elevated temperature with one or more of your components, I'd start with the CPU and Systemboard tests and loop them for at least 10-15 minutes. Keep a hand near the CPU fan exhaust port to see if the system is running overly warm.

5) I'm not sure if the following fan control information can be applied to the T2x systems or not as I've not read the entire forum, but you may want to check this out:

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewforum.php?f=27

That's all I can think of at the moment..

[strekship]

1. My battery only lasts for a few minutes, so i don't normally run my laptop off of it, but i did test to see if it would happen and it somtimes does. Just as randomly as when on AC power. I am normally on AC though.

2. I have done Alt-TAB and Crtl-Alt-Del, none of them do anything.

3. I run XP Pro SP2. It never comes up with any errors. Nothing in the event log.

4. I will try PC Doctor again.

5. I will check it out, thanks.