ThinkPad X40 completely borked *LARGE PIC*

[ShinyCyril]

I've been running my X40 (Crunchbang/Debian Linux) with no problems for a while now, battery charge was alright (far from stellar, but I got a couple of hours on full charge), and the Broadcom-based PCMCIA wireless card was working fine. Then after coming out of sleep the battery light starts flashing amber and it won't register the battery as charging. The adapter is working fine as it runs without problems when the battery is removed. About a minute after I remove the adapter, the machine died - despite it being plugged into mains for a couple of hours. The battery now won't hold any charge - I have purchased a replacement from eBay - I find it strange though that it went so suddenly.

Anyway, thinking it might have been a BIOS problem, I reset the BIOS to defaults (running the latest 2006 update) - and now I can't boot at all. It is giving me the infamous 1802 unauthorized wireless card error. This is very strange because I never had this problem before - and then removing the wireless card and rebooting I get the same error - why on earth is it trying to reject the stock Intel card inside?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

[EDIT]
I apologise, I really should have taken a look before posting this. I popped the MiniPCI card out and found this piece of engineering handiwork jammed underneath it:


Removing that and everything's ok now - although I still don't know why the battery died so suddenly as it did. Think I'll replace the paste on the CPU while I'm here.

Admin note: Added PIC warning. When using in-line images, please try to keep them <50KB and put a PIC notice in the subject line. This helps those members who are on dial-up or using wireless data plans that charge by the MB.

[Neil]

Welcome to thinkpads.com. Glad you got that wifi card issue worked out!

It's not at all unusual for a battery to suddenly die. If a cell shorts out for whatever reason, it's pretty much done for.

Although, they usually slowing deteriorate, with diminished capacity, I've had batteries suddenly go completely bad, for no apparent reason.

[ShinyCyril]

Thanks for adding the tag - I often forget how big things look on the 1024x768 screens when I'm on a monitor!

Unfortunately in taking it apart to replace the thermal paste I've somehow managed to break the wifi again - I guess the slot is faulty in some way. Not to worry, I never used it anyway so I've just taken it out for now - might have another go at fixing it some other time.