My sick t30 and how I cured it

[cparker]

My t30 has been getting progressively sicker and sicker. I would boot up and then the cpu started faster and faster. The performance monitor rose over a few minutes to a fairly steady 100 percent cpu use. Then things got kind of frozen, not completely -- could still move the mouse -- but any application kind of would stop running and you couldn't close the apps. Finally, I figured out it had to do with the network. If I wasn't connected to a network it seemed to work just fine. Plugin the cable, and particularly run IE and it quickly deteriorated, but even if I didn't open a browser it still went bad. Hmmmm... maybe RAM. So I removed each ram card and switched positions. No change. Then I just tried one card in one slot, then in the other. No change. Not the ram. Hmmmm...maybe the network hardware in the computer. So plugged in an external ethernet card. Same problem with that when connected. Hmmmm.. what about wireless. Plugged in a wireless adapter and got it working. So far so good. But over time the cpu utilization started rising again particularly with IE and especially with windows update. But at least with the wireless things didn't get so bad so I couldn't exit the programs. So then I switched to Mozilla. Much better. Hmmmm... how could this be. Then I figured it had to do with windows update. My computer is fine. It's the update! so I disabled update in control panel. Now it runs fine in IE and in Mozilla. I switched to windiz update for my updates. All updated perfectly. What is going on? Is there some conflict that might have to do with the IBM software and windows update? I was so disgusted I was ready to trash this useless, broken computer. Now it just speedily does it's thing. It smiles, it doesn't overheat like it was doing. I got rid of all the speedswitch stuff and let it run normally at 1.8ghz and all is well. Hope thismight help someone else, and maybe someone here will clue me in as to what is goingon.

thanks,

A t30 lover who is finally smiling!

[danage]

Interesting. The T30 is a fine machine, really. Like in your case, most of the time, it's the buggy buggy software runnning that causes the trouble. Glad you figured it out.

If anything ever really really messes up, you can always do a clean system restore by using the Thinkvantage recovery partition and everything should be back to normal. Don't forget to back up your stuff beforehand, though :)

[cparker]

Thanks, Danage. Actually, I had installed the backup IBM software and had (fortunately) made a nice clean backup on cds when the machine had been running nicely backin September. Well, I wasn't sure what was causing the problem so I did a restore from those cds and then I discovered that whatever was going on was going on with the "good" image as well. That led me to believe that the problem was in the hardware. What I never would have dreamed of was that it was related to the windows update software elements that had obviously changed over time that are on the MS site. Or maybe it "upgrades" your update software to the latest version each timeyou log onto update. But this had me fooled. To make it worse. In any case, it's running beautifully now.

[danage]

wow, i have never heard of this before. thanks for sharing, this is probably really helpful for a lot of people since it isn't unlike many suffer the problem.

[dsigma6]

I switched to windiz update

I wish I could take credit for that. I've been praising/advertising their name all over the forum, but I've never heard anyone else using it. Good stuff, with Vista support on the way.

[cparker]

I've been using windiz update for a while. I read about it in relation to windows 95/98 for which ms had discontinued the updates. I use it all the time on my thinkpad 560 running 98se. It's a great service.