Close encounters of the third kind

[winslow]

While attending a convention in vegas this week I figured I'd bring my T23 along for the ride (flew from Hawaii). When I got around to firing up the laptop I was alarmed that the display wasn't working. I could very feintly see the word welcome while windows loaded but then absolutely nothing. I decided to shut down and let it rest. The next day I started it up and everything was fine. This morning while I was on the screen went blue and displayed an error message about the display driver being frozen. It restarted itself a couple of times but reaccured. I shut it down and let it rest a few minutes. When I fired it back up everything is fine now (for about 3 hours). Is this a warning that it is nearing the end? Anyone have something similar happen to them?

[rkawakami]

Nearing the end? Possibly. I've had T23 systems which never lit the screen but not one where it came and went. The faint image without the backlight could be a couple of things: inverter, backlight, lid switch, motherboard. As far as the frozen driver is concerned, usually it's a program that hangs, throws a blue screen and re-boots the system (think: DivX player with a corrupt video file conversion). I don't know if a hardware failure would cause the same problem.

I'd suggest running the video diagnostics out of the PC Doctor program and looping them for several times and see what that does.