T22 major power issues, is it a lost cause?

[bonestonne]

Ok, so i've had my Thinkpad T22 for maybe 3 months, wasn't originally mine, and i can't give a detailed history of it...just passed along person to person.

basically, it just doesn't power on. i push the power button, the HDD light flashes, it cuts off right there. in the process, the battery light dims to orange. however, i have it sitting under my desk plugged in [in an attempt to charge the battery] and the light is green, even though the battery does not hold a charge [or hasn't in a couple months of either non use, or lack of charging].

i'm afraid to say its dead, but if i push the power button long enough [repeatedly, not just holding it down], it will power on for about 2 to 5 seconds, and then shut off.

before i try to talk to my friend's uncle about it, i'd like some [near] professional advice on the matter. i've googled the problem and it doesn't seem to far or wide, but not very commong. the OS i had installed at the time [and only for about 3 hours] was Ubuntu 7.04

any help is greatly appreciated, and thanks in advanced.

[Robbyrobot]

It's not clear from your description whether you're trying to boot the computer with the battery alone, or have the AC power supply attached all the time.

If you have a weak battery and are trying to boot from that alone, it's no surprise that the computer won't boot properly, and particularly your comment about the brief power on is understandable. In this case you'll just have to work with the AC power supply attached and/or buy a new battery.

If you have the AC power supply attached all the time and the computer still won't boot, there are quite number of possibilities. One is that the of/on switch is defective or the keyboard poorly seated in its connectors - I have a T21 myself with this kind of problem and will have to reseat the keyboard and possibly replace it.

If it's not a problem with the keyboard/switch, I can only give you the advice others also mention in the forum: remove all the simply removable periphery (battery, hard disk, CD ROM drive or floppy, mini-PCI card, RAM) and see if the problem persists.

If yes, I have no solution other than to take the computer apart and reseat all connections, hoping for the best, i.e. that a connection has become oxidized or weak for some other reason and can be repaired by this means.

If this fixes the problem, then reattach the periphery one piece at a time until you find the one causing your problem. This localizes the difficulty so that you can deal with it specifically.

Hope this helps at least a little.

[rkawakami]

This sort of sounds like an early stage of the "blink of death" problem. A system with that problem will only flash the hard drive LED (about a 0.1 second) when the power button is pushed. I think the battery LED will light up if an AC adapter is plugged in. I'm trying to verify this with a T22 that I have which normally has this problem but it seems to be fully working at the moment .

That's one of the things which seems to make the system work again; let it sit with any power (AC or battery) for a week or two and see if that helps. What Robbyrobot posted is also very good advice. It's possible that if you do not have any real power problem (AC adapter and battery is okay), then one of the peripherals is preventing the system from booting. If the system still does not power up correctly when everything (except one memory module) is removed, then there's a problem with the motherboard or AC adapter. Trying another adapter (or measuring the voltage) will eliminate that as a source of the problem.

[bonestonne]

alrighty, what i'm going to do is just let it sit. my battery, well, i cant say i think its any good. in my opinion, the battery might be gone, so since i've left it plugged in for almost 12 hours, i'm going to take it out.

what i did yesterday and the day before was troubleshoot each piece individually, which sometimes led to no good result. i tried with different RAM, and i had the same problem. i just got a Thinkpad 600, but i like the T22 more, so i guess i can just try again later.

[bonestonne]

sorry to double post and all, but i need this bumped.

i just started googling some random phrases loosely relating to my problems, and "revive dead laptop" seemed to get me what i needed.

this is some stuff pulled from my google search:

I'm using an IBM ThinkPad R50 with Pentium-M processor. I have similar problems with it. Some times it won't come back from hibernation or suspend at all, sometimes it wakes up after a very long pause (over 5 minutes) and sometimes the machine just throws a blue screen of death instead of waking up.

many fixes include just a mobo replacement from IBM, however it doesn't appear to be just an IBM problem, or a Thinkpad issue, its widespread.

this is going to make me switch to Fedora 7 over Ubuntu, as people saying Red Hat based distros didn't have this problem, and it was possibly ACPI related.

can anyone back this up, expand on this, or kill my theory?