Thinkpads Forum

I recently got a used T61 from a friend, it had a broken screen so we got a replacement and it has been working fine for the past week, but this morning after using it for about half an hour it went into sleep mode on its own (wasn't idle), and after turning it back on it just goes into sleep mode again after a second or so. Also it has been intermittently going into periods where it turns itself back on from sleep mode every 10-15 seconds, and then going back. Worse still, the screen has completely stopped displaying anything while this happens (at first the screen turned back on and I could see the log in menu). The only way to turn it off was by ejecting the battery, the screen working when I booted it up and it was stable up until I actually logged on, then it went back into sleep mode after about half a minute.

I've searched online for solutions already, some people seem to have had similar but not quite the same issues to mine. A popular suggestion is that it might be a heating issue, but I seriously doubt this is the case for me because I can let it cool down and the problem persists regardless, and also I don't think it would turn itself back on if it was overheated.

Please help!

Does it go to sleep if you remove the hard disk? If not, might be a software issue though unlikely.

I haven't tried removing the hard disk yet, I'll give that a shot.

So after removing the battery and turning it on a few times it went back to a stable state, and was running fine all of yesterday so last night I put it into sleep mode to see what would happen. This morning I was able to use it for a good 10 minutes before it dropped into sleep mode again. However now shutting down by removing battery and starting back up isn't getting it back to functionality anymore, because now its done it once on the welcome to windows screen. When I re-started it up again it did not go into sleep mode while starting up, but the screen turned off and started intermittently blinking on and off, and it seemed to have frozen on the welcome screen.

I've had somewhat similar problems like you.
I suspected I had a faulty motherboard, but after a year I discovered it was caused by the heatsink. I don't know exactly why the heatsink caused problems, in terms of appearance he looked fine... The heatsink worked even fine on a T60 configuration.

What I do know is that my stability and random shutdown problems were over with a new genuine T61 heatsink.

It's been a while since my last post, but I'm still having problems with this. For a few weeks it was mostly working fine except for a few intermittent periods when the issue came back up again. Lately its been doing it more often though so I decided to come back here and see if I can get some help. At the moment I can't even boot it up all the way, when it begins to start up the screen flickers and right before it gets to the login screen it goes into sleep mode every time, it must be something with that transition that triggers it in this instance. However what usually happens is that if I leave it alone for a bit it will work, or at least not go into sleep mode at that point.

@Backslash or anyone else who thinks that it might be a heatsink issue, is there any way to confirm this? I don't want to go out and buy a new heatsink if it turns out that's not the case.