Thinkpads Forum

Hello all, so yesterday I inadvertently bumped my perfectly working X61T SXGA+ against a column supporting my computer desk while I tried to put it in its docking station. The bumping didn't feel hard, but then the interesting set of symptoms have appeared:

• Some of the status indicator lights stopped working; while the power indicator light has dimmed significantly.
• The tablet buttons on the LCD bezel (rotate screen, tablet menu, move up/down/etc.) stopped working.
• More importantly: the digitizer stopped working (no pen input).

I suspect (and hope) for a loose cable. But I have no idea really... Armed with the hardware maintenance manual and a bunch of disassembling videos found on the internet, I am planning to open up the laptop tomorrow to investigate. It will be my first serious Thinkpad repair, though, and I am not keen on removing the front screen bezel (to have access to the status indicator circuitry & cables) given that it is apparently glued against the screen.

So my question for you would be where should I look first? Any pointers or tips (or theory on what's the underlying cause) will be appreciated as well, especially since I don't really know what I am doing and that this is still my main work laptop...

I'll update this thread on the status of the repair in any case...

== More details ==

The laptop part which bumped against the column was the back of the 8-cell battery (which I use to carry the laptop around).

Status indicator LEDs: (from left to right)
- the wifi one is working with full brightness
- the numlock and caplock indicators are *not* working
- the HDD activity one is working, but dimmer than usual
- the power indicator is working, but much dimmer than usual
- the battery indicator, the plugged in indicator and the standby indicators are not working

Other observations:
- When I close the lid, normally the laptop goes to sleep; right now nothing happens.
- When I turn the screen in laptop mode, normally the display is auto-rotated; right now, it seems that this is not detected (and the display rotate button on the bezel doesn't work; so that's annoying ;o)

Oh, and of course the laptop is out of warranty since August 2012...

All right so here is an update on my problems and repair...

I opened up the baby today (it was easier than I thought) and inspected the LCD parts as well as the connections to the LCD extend board. Everything looked fine, and reseating the connections didn't solve the problems.

Because I have two other X6x tablet laptops, I was able to do some transplants to troubleshoot a bit...

I know that the LED/digitizer problem is not from the microprocessor board and the LCD inverter card, as swapping them to my normally functioning X60t (XGA) maintained normal function in it (the LED [on the microprocessor board] worked normally), and the pen/touch input kept working fine on the X60t.

I know that the wacom digitizer on the SXGA+ screen seems to still work, as when I put it in my old X61t (which also had a SXGA+ screen), the pen input works [modulo the tiled resolution problem which already existed in this laptop which I will explain more below].

So other possibilities could be:
- the LCD cable? (I haven't changed it yet, as it is a pain and I don't really have a compatible cable which I know for sure is working [see below for the parts I have and problems with them])
- the motherboard?
- any suggestion?

The reason I suspect the motherboard could have problems is that I found a thread which described exactly the same symptoms as I had (LEDs partially functioning; tablet buttons broken; digitizer not working). The person did change the LCD cable, microprocessor board and inverter, and it did not fix the problem. No fix was mentioned in the thread though...

Another relevant thread I found was this one, where somebody had partial LED problems on a X61 (not tablet though). In their case, the cable was obviously damaged and so changing it fixed their problem. Another difference though is that their HDD activity light was not working (whereas mine is) and neither the 'power on' indicator [the slanted 'z'] (whereas mine is dimmed).

So any suggestion of what else to try?

=== My Frankenstein plans -- making a working laptop out of my three??? ===

So I currently have three laptops:
- X60T 6363-95U MT/MV WWAN with Windows XP -- everything works fine on this one (though it is quite slow!)
- old X61T 7762-WY2 SXGA+ -- this one has the problems described in this thread from last year where I described a "tiled resolution" problem for my screen which also had the bubble problem [more on this below]
- new X61T 7769-A67 SXGA+ with Windows 7 x64 -- this is the one that I was talking about in this thread...

The big question is how can I mix parts to get a functioning laptop with SXGA+ resolution + pen input?

The problem with the old X61T is that
a) its SXGA+ screen has the bubble problem
b) it often boots into the wrong XGA resolution (instead of SXGA+) and get a "tiled resolution" setup as well as a flickering of the display as described in my thread from last year as already mentioned above.

The bubble problem a) can be easily solved by using the screen from my new X61T in the old X61T. On the other hand, using the new screen maintained the wrong XGA resolution problem. As an interesting note: PC Doctor diagnostic (from a bootable CD) says that "digitizer firmware" N/A in both my old X61T and my new X61T. On the other hand, the pen input works in the old X61T (just with the wrong resolution and weird tiled display) when booting into Windows (the pen input doesn't work in the new X61T -- I get the 'wacom router mouse' "this device cannot start" (code 10) error in device manager).

Finally, note that as I had mentioned in the tiled resolution thread, I can sometimes boot with the right resolution in the old X61T (and then as long as I don't reboot, it maintains the correct resolutions across sleep sessions, etc.). The weird way I can usually fix it is by the following procedure:
1) I put it on my docking station; make sure the display is only on the external display, then I shut it down
2) I let it cool for a while (say overnight; though I guess 30 minutes worked in the past) -- but the cooling is crucial for some reasons!
3) Then I boot on the docking station... Because of the last configuration, the boot sequence appears only on the external screen, not the LCD. Then when I log into Windows and re-activate the LCD screen, it sometimes has the right resolution (no idea why!). Pen input works fine...

So because of this weird behavior on my old X61T, I am not sure which parts I should swap between the two computers! If somebody had ideas on what could be the source of these problems, that could be made easier...

Any pointer appreciated! Oh, and if you also have pointers on how to clean up the leaked adhesive from the LCD screen (a common problem with the bubbles on the SXGA+) on the plastic case and the circuit boards, I'd be happy to hear them as I'd like to clean this mess in my old X61T...

Long post, sorry but I did not bother to read through all of it.

Over the past 3 weeks I stumble upon some X60T and X61T for cheap. I swapped the screen assembly from a T60T into a T61T body and love the screen and speed. X61T allowed me to upgrade memory to 4 GB, 64 bit OS, and after Middleton's BIOS flash, SATA II speed. I did this twice and got 2 hybrid X60T/X61T. I did the reverse swap (X61T screen into X60T body) and sold. The other I keep for spare parts.

The swapping was easy as I had everything apart anyways to clean and reapplied the thermal paste. The temp difference after I did this was noticeable and was worth it. Plus I love to tinker and learned a bunch.

If I remember correctly, the lid detection switch that takes care of lid closing and tablet mode rotation consists of a small magnet under the keyboard bezel, and magnetic switches on the inverter and/or microprocessor boards. If changing out the boards does not improve things, try swapping the keyboard bezel as well.

This sounds like the perfect opportunity/excuse to take all three of your tablets apart and start switching parts around.

Gee, what an adventure...

In the end, what I will end up doing is buying a cheap X61T L7500 online and just swap in it the functioning (but precious) SXGA+ screen from the X61T with the weird LED light problem mentioned in this thread; as well as my awesome 240 GB SSD drive and 8GB RAM...

It will be much simpler than troubleshooting my old X61t (with the tiled resolution problem) with the new X61t (with the LED / tablet buttons / digitizer problem) by swapping parts around. In particular, swapping the LCD cable between the two is quite a delicate endeavor (there are so many cables passing through the tablet hinge!) and I am not even sure that it will solve anything, though I could certainly mess up something more (as for example in the next paragraph). And I had real work to do on my laptop this week-end...

I actually got scared on Friday morning when my new X61t started to have the fatal 'thermal sensing error' when booting. It was puzzling, as it didn't have this problem on Thursday evening; and I didn't change anything between Thursday evening and Friday morning... I read online it might be a problem with the cpu fan -- but cleaning it up with compressed air didn't fix the problem. The thermal sensing error would normally prevent any booting, and just force a shut down of the computer; but interestingly, pressing the ESC key when booting would sometimes let it boot the HDD fine (but *not* the BIOS setup or the external USB drive with the PC Doctor diagnostic tool) -- (???). Totally weird. Message 8 in this thread had also mentioned that pressing ESC would enable booting, though I have no idea why... When monitoring the CPU temperature in software after booting, no abnormally high temperature was detected. And weirdly enough, my 'thermal sensing error' disappeared as soon as I have put back the original SXGA+ screen (on Thursday evening, I had swapped the bubble problem LCD screen from the old X61t to the new X61t for troubleshooting; then I didn't have the thermal sensing error, but then it appeared in the morning on the new X61t without new manipulations -- just weird!). I have no idea why the screen should influence whether a thermal sensing error is encountered or not. Perhaps it's just a random fluke...

So thanks for the encouragements to swap parts around. But given all these random problems appearing and that I need a working computer for my real job; I'll just go with the easy way right now of putting the SXGA+ screen in a replacement computer, and leave figuring out the LED / tablet buttons / digitizer (new X61t) problem as well as the tiled resolution problem (old X61t) as a side project for my 'free' time... It was a good learning experience though -- it was quite interesting to see the inner working of the machines, and do a bit of detective work...

Oh, and to clean up the leaked adhesive from the LCD screen in my old X61T, I ended up using this adhesive cleaner that I found at the hardware store. It is officially not supposed to be used on plastic (and did do some slight greying of the black bezel); but it did clean pretty well all the gooey and sticky stuff on PCB boards and bezel.