X24 freezes after a few minutes

[AlanHK]

My X24 had "died" a few weeks ago. Power light would ocme on, but nothing else.

Not having time to work it out I put it aside. A few days ago I turned it on and was pleased to find it boot normally. Windows started and I could run applications. A few minutes later though it blue screened.

Rebooting, this time it just froze after a few minutes, the screen not updating, totally unresponsive to keyboard and Touchpoint.

I rebooted again, and went to the BIOS setup, where again, it froze after a few minutes, so this problem is not a Windows or hard disk problem.

Any ideas?

[sjthinkpader]

Remove the CPU heatsink fan assembly and reapply heatsink compound.

[rkawakami]

One thing that you might want to try before a teardown of the system: get a copy of memtest86+ and run it.

http://www.memtest.org/#downiso

Sounds like you could be having a temperature-related failure of your memory or other component. If the system still locks up, then you can also try PC Doctor for DOS if you have a floppy for the X24:

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... MIGR-39554

Run the CPU/Coprocessor and systemboard tests. And finally, if you can download, install and run MobileMeter, that program can monitor your CPU temperature so you'll have an idea if the CPU is what's giving you the problem:

http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/Sys ... eter.shtml

[AlanHK]

Thanks for the above advice.

It does seem to be RAM, I took out the optional RAM chip and booted with the wired in 128 MB.

It's been running normally (though very tedious disk swapping, of course) for a few hours.

I ran MobMeter: what is a normal temperature for an X24?
It's mostly been about 47-49C, went up to 60 or so during some PC Doctor tests.
MobMeter says shutdown is 95C.

I put the RAM back in and it fails to boot at all.
So that seems fairly conclusive.

====

More follow-up;

I called the RAM manufacturer, Kingston, to see if I could get a replacement under their "lifetime warranty". They said it was probably fake.
The serial number on it is KVR133X64C3A/512 (for PC133 512 MB )
And if I Google for that, the ONLY hits that come up are online auction sites, which is suspicious in itself.

So not much chance of a refund.
But at least the ThinkPad is resurrected.

[rkawakami]

Not sure what the "normal" temps for an X24 would be but an X22 that I use typically runs in the low 50's for web browsing. I'd say that if it were the CPU going critical, you would see that it will closely approach, if not goes over, the 95C shutdown limit.