Thinkpads Forum

I own this brilliant piece of digital equipment, ThinkPad x200s. And after running on DC power for quite a long time, the fingerprint reader, that contains metal parts and is so kindly placed under my right hand by the designers, begins to electrocute me. This doesn't seem to be static electricity, the effect has constant strength. It's rather strong and even prevents me from typing. And when I try to pull the cable out of the notebook, that electrocutes me too. Reboot makes it stop.
However, this "feature" is rather hard to reproduce, though it happens again and again at a random time.

Has anyone had the same problem and is it possible to solve it?

BTW: I am running Gentoo Linux on it.

P.S. Is there anything to do with the Hitachi hdd "clicking" sound?

Moderators, please move this one to the x200/x200s topic

Admin note: Done!

Yikes, that sounds like a pretty bad problem. I haven't had any experience with fingerprint readers and Linux (personally don't care for the readers), but are there drivers for it? If not, you could try disabling it in the bios and see if that does anything.

I remember some Sony laptop back in the day had a grounding problem, where if you touched the chassis you would get shocked. I guess worst case you could just open up the laptop and disconnect the fingerprint reader.