T60p no POST/not powering on

[Oakridge]

Hi guys,

I'm having a problem with my beloved T60p (4:3)--right now, it's not powering on correctly and does not display the ThinkPad splash right when it starts up. The power, battery, AC indicators are lit but the screen stays black and doesn't do anything. If there is a disc in the optical drive, it'll spin up and spin down. Last night, the laptop was working normally but all of a sudden the screen went black, so I turned it off and turned it back on, but it didn't start (the same as it's doing now). I thought it might be overheating so I waited a bit and tried turning it on again, and it booted into Windows but less than 30 minutes later the screen went black again, and now it hasn't worked since. It might be worthwhile to note that this scenario has happened to me before in the past (maybe within the past 2-3 months) but after waiting awhile it always ended up working again.

Since the screen went black, I thought it might be the LCD, so I hooked up the VGA to an external monitor and did Fn+F7, but it didn't do anything (and I'm not sure if you can switch to an external output while it's booting?). After doing some research it looks like it could be the CPU, or the entire motherboard? I also pulled my RAM and it did give me the intermittent 3 beeps, and when I put the RAM back in there were no beeps but still no POST.

Do you guys have any thoughts on what might be causing this? Maybe it'll work for a little tomorrow, I managed to get PC Doctor on a CD and will try to run some diagnostics if I can, but I appreciate any inputs! Thanks

[ajkula66]

Welcome to the forum!

Has your LCD been reddish/pinkish on initial boot prior to this last episode?

[Oakridge]

Thanks for the welcome Actually, I used to read this forum often back when I first got my T60p and thought I had an account but now it's been too long--getting old and can't remember

I haven't had any type of coloring or artifacting issues with the LCD during any of these events, so I'm thinking it probably isn't the screen.

A few more things I forgot to mention:
- the cooling fan spins up when I press power but stops after a few seconds
- tried both battery and AC power separately with same results
- and now that I think back, I used to get BSODs every once in awhile and I'm pretty sure they were caused by something that had ATI in the name, and after Windows loaded it would say "This system has recovered from a serious error" and proceed to error-report, then a browser window would pop up with Microsoft saying something about video card or video drivers being the culprit

So now I'm thinking maybe the GPU is causing all this (FireGL V5200)--ah, so many possibilities!

[_65536_kb_sec_]

I would like to use the thread to ask the following: Are there any common problems with the ATI GPU's used in T60p. I've been always having a feeling that laptops with separated GPU (not integrated in the chipset) have problems with it.
So could anyone who have enough experience with such machines please share some info and opinion.

[ajkula66]

@Oakridge:

You may want to unplug the internal monitor and try the external one only, to see whether that gets you anywhere.

If you're residing in NYC you can drop me a PM and I'll be happy to look at the machine. I'm in the city M-F.

As for the common problems with T60/p boards...I had several ATi-based units die on me from VRAM corruption, apart from that they've been pretty reliable, Never had an Intel-based T6x/R6x/Z6x with a failed board, but that really doesn't mean all that much since I've owned a lot more ATi-based machines from this era...

[Oakridge]

ajkula66,

Thanks for offering to take a look for me--much appreciated! But actually I had some time this evening so I worked my way through to free the motherboard and I believe I found the culprit to be the GPU. Not the processing core but 1 of the 4 VRAM chips looks to be lightly discolored (darkened) which is probably charring due to heat. One thing I noticed is that the GPU thermal pad on the heatsink/fan assembly is mainly for the processing core and not for the memory chips--I'm not sure how hot they could get (probably much less than the core anyway) but somehow one chip got burnt and another looks like it was starting to get there too.

I guess thats one more data point for the robustness of discrete ATI GPUs. Time to look for a replacement board--thanks again for the help!