Thinkpads Forum

I had a dead T61 with nvidia NVS 140M laying around. I was about to dump it into the recycling bin when I figured what the heck, let's see if it can be resurrected for fun.

Symptoms of my "dead" T61:
-Powers on
-No internal display (no backlight, black screen)
-No display over VGA
-Beeped when power button was held after system was powered on

Procedure:
1. Strip down and remove the motherboard
2. Soak the nvidia, intel northbridge, and intel southbridge chips with no-clean liquid flux.
3. Find a heat gun, crank it up on high, do a few passes around the board in a circular motion to preheat
4. Move the heat gun over the three BGAs, move in a circular motion as before, but slower as to focus more heat in the area. Do this for about 5 minutes
5. do a few more passes around the rest of the board, as to prevent warping
6. Let the board cool for about 20 minutes, then reassemble. Don't forget fresh paste on the CPU, GPU, and southbridge.
7. Turn it on, and see if it works!

In my case, T61 booted up without problems. I am really quite amazed this worked, though I don't expect it to be working for long. I took this opportunity to apply Highsun's 0.9V undervolted ASPM enabled BIOS to the T61. This was a fun quarantine project, maybe others with dead T61 can play roulette and see if they win!

Typed from my Lazarus T61

I actually suspect that as Luis Rossman once said the reason this works is because heating the chip up makes something inside the video chip work again, rather than because it fixes the connection between the chip and the motherboard.. Congrats on having it working again! Out of curiosity, which flux did you use? If that theory about fixing the inside of the chip rather than the outside is correct flux probably doesn't matter much but I'd still like to know.

I used Kester 951.


I see tpfancontrol and GPUZ have two different temperature readings for the nvidia chip. GPUZ is 10C higher than TPfancontrol. I’m willing to believe the GPUZ reading more since this series of nvidia chips were evil and very inefficient

They sold me a T61 with nvs 140m with the exact same situation which worked fine for 2 hours. I bought it for cheap and didnt mind the issue. But once it is dead, doesnt matter how many times it is resurrected, it will go weaker/crazier as much as it entered the lazarus pit.

Thanks for sharing your experience. Nice saying LAZARUS.