Thinkpads Forum

Ok,

Not too long ago I journeyed deep into the guts of my X61T to pe-paste the CPU with a fresh coat of Arctic Silver 5. I am not going to re-hash that thread, but it's linked here:

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=30&t=111884

Now on to the issue:

It would appear that after re-assembly of the laptop I have no sound. Weird. So tonight I removed the pen, the keyboard and the palm rest to make sure I had plugged the speaker in and that I did not short anything out. In both the dis-assembly and re-assembly of the laptop, I followed the instructions to the from the HMM for this laptop.

So once I had all the screws out, I re-installed the keyboard and palm rest and powered up. Windows re-detected my sound card and I have sound. So I figured I was good to go and re-installed all the screws after powering down. Now upon powering up, I have no sound again.

What this tells me is either I have the wrong screw in the wrong place, or something is shorting out when all the screws are in. My question then is where on the motherboard is the sound chip? What screw location should I be looking at in order to make sure everything is ok? Every other aspect of the unit works just fine, and without the screws in the sound also works.

Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Well this really blows.

I have completely removed and re-installed the motherboard. I labeled and sorted all screws before and after installation. No matter what I do, I cannot get sound out of the machine. Windows says no sound device is installed. I have booted into Ubuntu and ran lspci which does show an Intel High Definition Audio Device.

So I can only surmise that at some point a trace on the motherboard got damaged or there was EFI, though I do take precautions against that. Short of buying a new planar board, anyone have any suggestions? I was really starting to enjoy my new X61T and it's broken.

[censored].

Double [censored].

Switch the laptop on with all screws removed, play some music, and during that insert one screw after another.
When the music stops, you should have your 'evil area' and 'bad screw'.
Maybe wait until after Halloween? This might be a Trick instead of a Treat (or even a Threat?). LOL.

Meh.

Gonna craigslist it.

A client gave me a nice D630 which I am using now. I thought I wanted a 4:3 laptop, so I got the X61T. Turns out once you've been bitten by the widescreen bug you don't go back. Maybe down the road I'll get an X2xx machine or something.

Thanks for the advice though, if I feel like working on the machine again i'll try your suggestion. In the meantime this D630 has really grown on me. I like how the extended battery sticks out front and has a nice rubber coating. It provides a rather nice wrist rest.

Ultimately I'd like a machine that supports mSATA. I think the lowest model in a 14" widescreen format that supports that and is a Thinkpad is the T4xx series but i'll have to check ThinkWiki to verify that.