t23 problems

[dkish]

hello to all
i had 2 t23 laptops that were in very good shape and working well. i gave both of these to a good buddy of mine for his two kids to use for school. i now have both of them back with issues!! one will boot up once in a while and after a few minutes the screen will line out and the unit will freeze up. it wont even shut down unless the battery is pulled. the other will boot up with lines and dots on the screen. after a minute or two i get the blue screen.i can run pc doctor on this one and it fails the vidio memory test. i think the kids might have had their i-pods hooked up to these computors. could this have caused the vidio cards to fail? any ideas??
Thanks in advance
Dave

[rkawakami]

No, the iPods should not have caused any issues which would affect the screen. Most likely the systems have received some rough handling which has led to the video problems you now see. Some failure points to check would be:

- the LCD ribbon cable; re-seat the connector at the motherboard and closely inspect the area of the cable which exits the base and goes into the lid
- SODIMM connectors; look for loose pins where it's soldered to the motherboard
- infamous inductors; one above the CPU, the other two on the bottom of the motherboard opposite the PCMCIA slots

The T4x systems have a problem with the graphics chip working loose from the motherboard. I've gone through many T23s and have not seen this type of problem with them, but doesn't mean that it can't happen. If your problems are with the video chip then I'm afraid that you are probably looking at a motherboard replacement. Homebrew solutions to re-flow large surface mounted parts are hit-and-miss.