T60 power up issues

[yak]

You got to be kidding me, 8 days from the end of warranty, a laptop that was working wonderfully all the time starts giving me problems.

It now happened second time in the last week. I plug it in, the battery and power adapter lights light up but when I press the power button, everything goes off. At this point I have to remove the power cord and the battery.

The odd thing is, when I put the battery back and try to power it on without the power cord, it starts fine. I can plug the adapter in immediately after pressing the power button and it will keep working (the battery is properly charged too).

So, what so you make of that? What could it be?

[yak]

It seems this stops happening when the machine is warm. If it's cold and I start it on battery only, the lights will just blink and then come on again after about 1 second. At this point I can plug it in and it works normally.

Any ideas?

[Harryc]

What happens when it is cold and the battery is removed and you plug in the adapter only and try to power up the machine? Trying to eliminate the battery ...

[yak]

What happens when it is cold and the battery is removed and you plug in the adapter only and try to power up the machine? Trying to eliminate the battery ...

In that case the power LED (the "plug" one) will just go off.

I decided not to send it in, it's so customized they most probably wouldn't want to fix it for free anyway (XGA LCD switched for SXGA+, Bluetooth added, magnesium frame break glued, clearly opened multiple times, etc.). I will be looking for an upgrade to T410 in the near future anyway. For now, I'm always able to get it working by making sure the adapter is not connected when I start it (will have to make sure I never drain the battery completely though). I plug it in only after the ThinkPad logo appears. Then everything works, the laptop is running off of AC power and there are no freezes or unexpected shutdowns (knock, knock).

This 1s thing I mentioned earlier happed just once. Now it always starts on battery only.

I'm also not able to use the standby mode, at least not with AC plugged in. If I do that, it will go dead as soon as it cools down. Haven't tried without the adapter. Will have to change my habit as I've always switched it to standby for a night.

I'm fairly sure this is a motherboard issue as I have stripped it down to pieces and tried starting it with just the CPU, display (to observe the LEDs), a second adapter that's normally used with my brother's T60 and a different keyboard (as the power button is there). No RAM, no cooler, no drives, no modem, no miniPCIe cards, no TouchPad. Also tried without the display but with cooler (so I could see it starting, the fan should spin up shortly). No luck. I will probably keep lurking for a cheap motherboard, just to keep this baby alive, we went through so much together .