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).Over the weekend, I was just using my system normally (had my gf on skype at the time) on battery power when the screen flickered. The flicker was brief, but was the kind of thing you see when windows needs to redraw everything. About thirty seconds later my computer powered down hard (no graceful shutdown).
Since then I have been trying to figure out what conditions it reboots. While just under battery power, the system tried rebooting itself repeatedly: While powered down, it would turn on, display the Thinkpad splash screen for a few seconds during post, then shut down hard again, only to try restarting again a few seconds later. Removing the battery (obviously) stops this pattern. With the battery out and running off of AC power, it can get further through the boot sequence and can actually load windows from the hard drive. I still haven't been able to see a pattern between battery, battery+AC, or just AC and it's rebooting. It tends to stay on longer without rebooting if it has been completely without a power source (AC and battery removed) for a while.
While loading windows, it can crash at variable times: during the windows loading screen, while starting up the UI and explorer.exe, after being on and working fine for 3 minutes. Disabling almost all services that windows would normally start up with helped enough for me to make backups of everything I wanted from the system and dump it on the network, with it rebooting only once in the process. I use "Hiren's Boot CD" for many hardware and software debugging issues. I was able to boot onto a USB drive with this image on it, load a tool, and start an analysis (ie, Hitachi disk health scanner), only for it to freeze for a while and then reboot. The system reboots on the Windows installation disk as well.
Sometimes I can get into the BIOS setup screen, sometimes I can't. I haven't been able to narrow down the conditions in which the system works because what works one time seems like it won't work later. Swapping out all or some of the RAM for the 512MB chip that I got with the system made no difference. This seems more and more like a hardware problem, but I can't figure out what it could be. Unfortunately, my warranty ran out a handful of months ago, so I can't really just send it to Lenovo and have them replace various parts.
My question to you guys is: any idea what is going on? Do you think it is possible to narrow down the problem with these symptoms, or have you heard of anything remotely similar before? Any advice is appreciated!
