Thinkpads Forum

Here is an odd problem on my T60P.

Sometime around the time that my computer was opened up for a thorough dusting (not sure whether the problem preceded or followed the cleaning) I've had some interesting issues with my display. My current Flexview panel is nice and bright... no darkening of corners... and I often turn the display down to 5 o 6 on the brightness scale.

Also, there no display oddities, lines, or artifacts.

I have a habit of turning the brightness down when I am running a virus scan, and usually when I come back to my computer all I need to is get a key to stop the screensaver, and turn the brightness back up. In the last few weeks there have been occasions where I would come back to the computer and the screen was entirely black... no moving windows screensaver... and hitting a key does nothing, nor does turning the brightness up. The screen is black while the computer is clearly running. After a hard reboot, the display comes up normally. This scenario has happened a number of times in the last few weeks.

Today, the computer started up with a black screen, and rebooting the computer did nothing to alter this. I then connected an external monitor, and after toggling the F7 key the external display came up. Toggling the F7 key again brought up the laptop' s display, which looked entirely normal. The computer also ran normally. So I decided to leave it on for several hours while I was out. When I came back the screen was black again. Repeating the procedure of turning on the external monitor, and toggling the F7 key, the T60P display came up, and looks just fine. I have been working on it for several hours without incident.

Has anyone else had this experience? Of course, I'm wondering if some display connection was affected by the cleaning of the laptop.

Luckily I have another new FlexView screen which I bought from an esteemed forum member.

Thanks

UPDATE

I shut the T60P, unplugged all USB devices, turned it back on and the computer started up without the Thinkpad's normal startup screen. The display screen was black.. I turned on the external monitor, and the start splash showed on that display. After a moment (without hitting F7) the external display went black and the Thinkpad display came up!

Now that I think about it, this automatic switching from the external to the laptop's display may have been what happened before...in other words without toggling F7.

Curious.

I don't think it's the screen.

The graphics hardware is having trouble remembering its state. Here's a question for the knowledgeable:

If the screen-->mobo connector is intermittent, can it simulate the unplugging of a monitor? If so, then oxidation/corrosion/lousy seating could cause the graphics hardware to look for an alternate active monitor. The firmware might "prefer" the external monitor connector, even if it isn't connected. If/when the mobo connector becomes functional again, the F7 key would work. With a dirty connector, every creak of the screen lid could make it connect or disconnect.

If this theory is legitimate, a possible cure would be to reseat the connector, possibly with some contact cleaner.

A couple quick things you can check is do a static discharge by removing power and battery and pressing the power button ten times, hold a few seconds each and 30 seconds on the last, the replace power and reset bios defaults and see if there is any change.

Also you might want to boot from a live linux CD and see if it behaves the same. This will rule out a software issue because I've seen power manager act flaky before where it will power off the screen even if the settings aren't engaged to do so. I've also seen failing backlights cause this, but there is normally other sysptoms too like lack of brightness or reddish tint.

Thank you, gentlemen, for your erudite answers.

I think the first thing that I will do is look for my Live Linux CD later today and try booting from it.

You don't think the GPU driver could be at fault?

Today, it started with a black screen, but I again turned on the external monitor while it was still booting and...voila...the external monitor shows my startup and then desktop, and a moment later the image switches automatically to my T60P screen, which is nice and bright, without defect.

This could become a hobby.

I downloaded and burned the ISO of [censored] Small Linux, a really small Linux Live CD. However, if I try booting from the CD, don't I need to hit F1 to change the boot sequence....which requires a working display to show the BIOS options? Isn't there a key combination that I can press to temporarily change the boot to CD so I can test things without the external monitor enabled?

^^ No not really. Closest you'll get is hitting F12 at during post to bring up a list of bootable devices. If you knew that the CD drive is the second device in the list for example, then it will be easy enough to memorize the sequence.

edit - What I've done in the past when I'm suspecting hardware failure is to isolate said machine to one and only 1 boot device. That way the system will try to find and boot to said device. I use gparted to do this which is a wonderfully useful and small Linux Live system. Doesn't matter the boot sequence set in BIOS if there's only 1 bootable device attached, the system will try to boot to the only available bootable device or it'll let you know that it found nothing to boot to.

Rather than using DSL (D@mb Small Linux), which is designed to run on a 20yo computer I'd go with a modern linux like ubuntu or mint. They will have the proper drivers for your video card instead of a very basic vga output and will recognise the power options that allow the OS to power off the screen. What you want to find out is if you have a software problem or a hardware problem.

As for your bios, if you remove the harddrive it should boot from your optical drive, if not, press F1 to enter bios, F9 to load defaults then "enter", then F10 to save and exit and "enter" to confirm. The default settings should boot hdd first and optical next.

Thanks for the advice Tuus.

Have you noticed that the website seems a bit slow the last couple of days?

Anyway, where's a good download site for Mini?

Do you discount the notion that the driver could have anything to do with it?

I was wondering if the physical actuator utilized by the lid closing might be stuck or defective, but in power management I have closing the lid "doing nothing", and all sleep and hibernation options set to off. But just now I checked if closing the lid actually does nothing, and in fact the display turns off when the lid is nearly closed!

So perhaps, as suggested earlier, the power management software is corrupt! What to do about that, if true?

Otherwise, once I trigger the internal display with an external monitor, the computer runs normally. I did, however, turn off the screen saver option, and now when I leave the computer running for hours the display stays on.

Also I noticed yesterday that in the now suspect power management panel that somehow the shutdown from start menu actually was set to sleep rather than shut down, so I changed that.

So...corrupt power management and the dreaded Lenovo sleep/hibernate flaw??

As I mentioned we need to sort out if this is hardware or software. If you boot linux and it behaves the same way, you'll know it's not software. If it is software, the universal method to fix it is to wipe the drive and re-install. Although such problems can be fixed, in most cases its complicated and far more work than reinstalling. You could try removing and reinstalling drivers, but more often than not you'll spend a lot of time with a low chance of success which is why all manufactures and repair shops just wipe the drive. It makes a complicated job easy.

Linux Mint

ubuntu linux

Either of these distributions offers a live CD, just select the option to not make any changes to your computer and it will run solely from the cdrom disc.

In this case a positive test result (meaning the problem is confirmed in linux) is fairly conclusive that your failure is hardware, but a negative result isn't going to be conclusive that your hardware is operating properly as it could be possible that the failure is somehow triggered by windows and not linux, but this is the best place to start (imo). If it works properly in linux the next step I'd do is to either wipe the drive and reinstall windows, or you could install a second windows version if you don't want to remove your existing installation, or if you have an extra harddrive you can install on it.

Out of curiosity, because of the oddities in my power options scheme, I checked Lenovo to see what the current Power Manger driver is. Then I followed Lenovo's readme instructions to see what driver version I had installed. They tell you to go to Programs and Features and check there. Well, I don't appear to have the Power Manager Driver Package installed!
All that's listed there is:
Lenovo Auto Scroll Utility
Lenovo System Interface Driver
Lenovo Thinkvantage Toolbox

Since the do nothing option for lid closing seems inoperative, and there are other oddities as well, wouldn't it make sense to install the Lenovo package?

Searching the web, it does seem a lot of people have had problems with sleep/hibernate/suspend and ineffective power options, including lid closing.

Well, things are back to normal for some reason.

I have not yet installed the current Lenovo Power Manager package. As I mentioned before, I do not seem to have a previous version installed.

Nevertheless, I went into the Microsoft power option menu (as before) and the ThinkVantage Power Management menu (although I don't know if it really operates without the Power Manager package installed). I made absolutely sure that the shutdown option from the Start Menu did not put the ThinkPad into suspend.

I noticed last night that with the external monitor connected but not turned on that the internal display came on as soon as the Microsoft icon (a little circle in Vista) appeared. In other words, I did not see the ThinkPad start screen nor the little illuminated light bar that shows that the system is loading. I did press the Fn key for 10 seconds at boot, which is supposed to turn off Suspend if that option happens to be on.

At any rate, this morning I disconnected the external monitor altogether, and the unit started up normally.

Isn't that interesting?