Thinkpads Forum

I have a Thinkpad T60 with ATI Radeon 1400 display card. Recently it has started becoming flaky in the following ways:

1) Occasional blue screens in ati2dvag (I'm on XP SP3).
2) Sometimes it fails to come out of standby. Symptom: Part of the screen is screwed up, and the trackpoint is unresponsive.
3) Sometimes I get clusters of random false-colored pixels.

The machine is out of warranty. Any suggestions for how best to get it working properly again? Most of the time it works fine, which in a sense is a shame, because it suggests that the problem will be hard to find conclusively.

The most likely problem is corrupted VRAM (video RAM), although this happens more often in T60p machines.
Run PC Doctor and do all the GPU tests.

Even without running the tests, I am now pretty sure you're right about it being a memory corruption problem. The reason is that lines and patches of incorrectly colored pixels are now starting to appear near prominent on-screen objects, and they go away when I refresh the background. Then they come back later.

Assuming you're right about the likely cause of the problem, what are my options for getting it fixed? Any idea what it's likely to cost?

By the way, I just tried running the quick video diagnostics -- no problems found. But I'm not surprised, because I think the problem is intermittent.

Is there a separate video memory card that can be reseated? Somehow I doubt it.

Unfortunately no. You are looking at a motherboard replacement.

dr_st wrote:Unfortunately no. You are looking at a motherboard replacement.

Any clue as to what that might cost?

I'm thinking that maybe it's time for a new laptop...

My notes say I have a spare x1400. PM if interested.

Followup: I have found a variety of driver-related problems with ATI graphics processors. In my particular case, the problem seems to be that I installed a new version of a power-related application (perhaps the Power Manager or Hotkey applications?) and it quietly turned on ATI PowerPlay. I don't even know when this happened, because the laptop spends most of its time in a docking station, and the problem appears to occur only when (1) PowerPlay is enabled, and (2) The machine is running on battery power.

I turned off PowerPlay, and the problem has not reappeared since then.

Thanks for the help, pointers, private messages, etc.

Similar problem on my 15.4 T60p. I was worried with it not being able to play Hulu or HD videos full screen before but lately its been getting worse. If the computer goes on standby while I have a movie playing on MPC, the video won't resume after coming back from standby and leaves a blank frozen MPC window that I have to force close.

It also seems to go on standby several more times immediately every time I bring it back out of standby.

The problems you describe are very similar to the ones I had on an old ATI x700 machine and are starting to show up in my T60p. Seriously starting to lose faith in ATi cards, they've been nothing but annoying failures. That's not to mention they almost always tend to have that static disturbance issue heard through the headphone/speakers or by putting an ear near the keyboard.