Thinkpads Forum

I just received this brand new T61P. Everything looks nice except when I play games such as C&C3, or just running 3dMark06, the system will power off by itself.

I did a system update using thinkvantage and installed all the updates, including the Bios update. Then I did a windows update and installed all of them except the video card driver at first. Still, no improvement on my problem. Then I go ahead and installed the video card drive the came with the windows update. The random shutdown seems getting better after installing the new driver, but the applications still crash to desktop randomly. And the error message reported that the video card driver stopped responding and recovered. Got BOSD once, searched the error code, came up nothing in detail except it's some what related to the video card.

I called the tech support, a few times to be exact, no one seems to know what's causing the problem. One of them don't even know what 3dMark06 is. And one of them asked me to update the Intel turbo memory driver, which I did. I grabbed the one from Lenovo website, which is older than the one on Intel's website. Still, didn't solve anything. I ran the pc doctor both in windows and in the hidden partition, all test came up passed. They told me it's a software related and they only trouble shoot issues caused by hardware failure.

I asked for someone to come out to my office and have a look as I purchased 1 year onsite service. They said they won't do that because they don't do diagnostic onsite. I had to send it back to the depot and depending on the workload, they wouldn't tell me how long it will take. So I guess I just wasted my money on that one. I asked my friends who has a PhD in computer science and my co-workers at the software R&D department, they all said it's a hardware issue since I have nothing else installed and it's a brand new machine.

So I am asking those who have had similar problems or experts on this for help.

Is this software or hardware related? Should I send it back to the depot for repairs?

Thank you guys.

lenovo is aware of T61p owners having issues with gaming/3D and are working on a solution.   the most recent thread covering it is here: any games that work with T61p/570m???

Thank you for letting me know, Erik.