Thinkpads Forum

My old T61 was given to a relative a few years ago; I decided to stay with T60p machines at the time because I couldn't stand the widescreen. (I've grudgingly learned to accept them.) It was shipped back to me last week with the complaint that it was stone cold dead - no lights, no nothing.

I plugged it in, and of course it lit up and booted just fine, and still connected to my wireless network after all those years. The battery was completely discharged.

I was ready to tell the owner that she must have not firmly attached the power cord to the brick, as those two-wire jobbies never hold very well.

The next day, it was dead.

It responded, perhaps by coincidence, to the power button trick and once again booted up fine.

It ran OK for a few days, and just today was once again dead. Again, it responded to the power button trick.

I've swapped the SSDs with my R61, re-activated both, and will send her the R61 as it is completely stable.

So now I have a T61 with some sort of intermittent issue. Does anyone have any wild ideas as to what might be failing? Could it be as silly as the CMOS battery? Yeah, I could probably replace the mainboard but the prospect doesn't excite me.

Informed pontification will be welcome.

Art

What's the 7-character model number on the bottom of that T61?

These were the exact same symptoms I had with my (non safe gpu date) Nvidia T61 right before it finally stopped working.

ajkula66 wrote:What's the 7-character model number on the bottom of that T61?

The model # is (was?) a 6460-7EU. But the MB was replaced a few years ago due to some water damage, so I'm not sure what it really is. Brad, are you still reading this forum"

6460-7EU is an Nvidia board. If the motherboard was replaced by Lenovo, they would have used one with an 08/08 board or newer. I *think* there should be a sticker under the RAM slot or in the battery slot that will tell you what kind of motherboard you have.

If you want to find out if you just have an nvidia board, it will be shown in device manager.

brchan wrote:6460-7EU is an Nvidia board. If the motherboard was replaced by Lenovo, they would have used one with an 08/08 board or newer.

It was replaced by forum member Brad after Lenovo declined to handle it under warranty.

Yes, it's an NVIDIA board. I haven't had to think about those legendary failures for a while - is a totally dead machine symptomatic of the GPU failure?

It just failed again, as I was checking Device Manager, due to running out of battery juice and shutting itself down. It wouldn't come back up without the power button technique.