Thinkpads Forum

My T60, which is 2 months old, reboots itself about 5 times each day. It's been returned for warranty repair and had the motherboard replaced, however, the problem has not gone away.

Initially I thought it was heat related. But, I've noticed that it only occurs at my office and never at home. At the office, it remains on 24 hrs/day - and according to the event viewer, it never reboots when I am not around at night. Many times the shutdown occurs when the machine is not in use - when I'm meeting with clients or on the phone.

I think the problem relates to the static electricity in my office. It's very dry and easy to get a shock from the filing cabinets, etc.. However, no other laptop or computer in the office suffers from the condition. The other laptops are not Lenovo products.

So, is my unit defective (suffering from improper grounding or the like) or does this model have a history of static-related problems (like the Toshiba A70)?

I appreciate any input.

Perhaps the electrical wiring in your office is not able to adequately provide required volts to presumably power hungry T60 in contrast to other machines or maybe your office's wiring gets voltage transients, a surge protector would be a good start to eliminate this consideration.

Also see if your thinkpad makes any difference after following o1sowise's (possible) solution in the below thread:

My T60p shutsdown every night.

I think I can rule out the office wiring issues. This morning, while the computer was on battery power only, it rebooted itself twice. First time was when I pugged in the USB wireless receiver for the mouse. Second time occurred when I sat down at my desk after getting a coffee.

Could be hardware or software - difficult to state based on lack of information.

I would suggest two things:

1) If this is a hardware issue, there are a number of possibilities to check for, but the first thing to look for in diagnosing a problem is to check your RAM. Download and run "memtest" (this utility will thoroughly test the RAM on your thinkpad). Spontaneous reboots sometimes are a result of bad addressing on the RAM. You can get memtest here: http://www.memtest.org/

2) To further diagnose if this is a hardware or software related issue, it's also good to check the crash dump of the OS you're running. If you're running XP, right-click "My Computer", then select the "Advanced" tab, then click the "settings" button found under the rubric "Startup and Recovery". A new window opens, uncheck "Automatically Restart" under the rubric "System Failure". Then reboot your machine.

Now, should a crash happen, you'll end up with a blue screen full of code instead of just a spontaneous reboot. Mark down the code that appears on the screen and you can either google it or quote it when you call Lenovo support - they'll be able to help you further.

Hope this helps.

icantux wrote:Could be hardware or software - difficult to state based on lack of information.

I would suggest two things:

1) If this is a hardware issue, there are a number of possibilities to check for, but the first thing to look for in diagnosing a problem is to check your RAM. Download and run "memtest" (this utility will thoroughly test the RAM on your thinkpad). Spontaneous reboots sometimes are a result of bad addressing on the RAM. You can get memtest here: http://www.memtest.org/

2) To further diagnose if this is a hardware or software related issue, it's also good to check the crash dump of the OS you're running. If you're running XP, right-click "My Computer", then select the "Advanced" tab, then click the "settings" button found under the rubric "Startup and Recovery". A new window opens, uncheck "Automatically Restart" under the rubric "System Failure". Then reboot your machine.

Now, should a crash happen, you'll end up with a blue screen full of code instead of just a spontaneous reboot. Mark down the code that appears on the screen and you can either google it or quote it when you call Lenovo support - they'll be able to help you further.

Hope this helps.

Sadly, I had already done both of these back in Dec/07 when the rebooting started to bother me. The machine doesnt do the minidump - it still automatically restarts, even though it has been set not to.

I think the problem is enviromental - it seems to reboot when it's touched/moved/someone enters or leaves my office. Quite often it occurs when I'm not using it. I've never had it reboot on me at home. It does it when operating on AC or just battery, when connected to the network and when not.

Anybody with a similar experience?

Your post just caught my eye. This is a known issue with the early T60 models. We have a good number of them out of our 400+ that experience this static-related issue.

When humidity is normal there are no issues, but when humidity drops into the twenties or teens we have more issues. What I found early-on, was that using wireless networking worked around the issue.

I worked with IBM/Lenovo for several months to issolate the issue. An engineer on the US side was able to inject specific strengths of static and could predict a hang/crash/reset based on the strength of the static.

Lenovo was unwilling to replace or correct the issue. They determined that a shielded ethernet cable required twice the level of static injection in order to cause a failure, so they sent us 300 shielded ethernet cables. Go figure.

I assume by now you've moved on and found something else to use, but if not, at least you can stop looking and wondering.

Maybe not the answer, but maybe a useful suggestion: You can set the O.S. NOT to reboot on a critical error. If the reboots are being caused by a fatal error and you don't catch it, you never get to know what might have caused it. Set not to reboot, you might see it frozen with an error message showing. I have not had to do this, but I saw the hint elsewhere. Then again, may this is not the issue at all.

This is what icantux had already suggested