Thinkpads Forum

I have my computer set to never sleep, just to turn off the monitors after a certain period of inactivity. I recently sent my X220 in for a repair, and now it has a new motherboard with a new BIOS revision. I'm running Windows 7 64-bit

Now, when I bring the computer back from inactivity (not sleep!) the external monitors on my docking station do not wake up. When I open the lid of the laptop the screen is on, but black. When I remove the laptop from the dock I hear a bunch of "hardware ejected" noises from Windows and a mouse cursor appears. The mouse blinks rapidly and Explorer never reappears.

CTRL-ALT-DEL does nothing. CTRL-SHIFT-ESC does nothing. The only way to bring the machine out of this state is to hard shut down and reboot it. This is a most miserable situation, because I walk away from my computer and come back fifteen minutes later all the time.

Searching Google and this forum does not yield any information on this problem, so I'm hoping that a previously silent guru comes forth and saves me.

Thank you!
-Sasha

More information:

It seems that every now and then I can undock the Thinkpad and it will come back alive, but usually it flashes repeatedly. What's also odd is that the computer feels somewhat warm when I bring it out of this state, as if it were consuming a lot of CPU while the screen was off. CPU consumption when the screens are up and running is about 0-1%.

Does windows keep log files that I can look at? I know where I'd go to see them in Arch Linux, but I have no idea where to go in Windows.

I called up Lenovo and asked about this and they thought it was a problem with the motherboard. Two replacements later and it's still showing the same symptoms.

In retrospect I should have just lived with the broken audio output - the cure appears to have been far worse than the disease. It's gotten to the point that I'm preparing to buy one of the high-resolution Macbooks to replace my x220. As a Thinkpad user for almost 20 years, this is mind blowing.