Thinkpads Forum

Folks,

Hope you can help. I just got a W500 exhibiting a strange problem. Posting here because most of you know that a W500 is essentially a T500 with both graphics chipsets, and this forum area gets more traffic than the nearly dead W500/W700 one.

This laptop is an ebay purchase, sold as fully working, with a copy of Windows 7 installed. Strange behavior is the machine boots through bios, and the starting screen of windows 7, then screen blanks, and i hear the startup sound. Nothing will turn the screen on until closing the lid, letting it go to standby, then reopen and the screen will resume operating and work normally all the time. Is this a weird win7 issue, or perhaps a lid sensor/hardware issue?

I've tried a lot of settings in the bios looking for the behavior, nothing has worked. My last ditch effort before sending back is to swap a hard drive from another of our W500's and see if it follows hard drive or hardware.

any ideas?

Thanks
Mark

Most likely it's the lid switch malfunctioning.
There is a little magnet on the underside of the KB bezel. The magnet is near the center left-to-right, and all the way in the back.
It triggers a switch in the inverter.

Thanks RBS, i did investigate if that was a problem. I ended up swapping hard drives from W500 to W500 last night, and found the problem followed the hard drive. My assumption at this point, this is a botched W7 install. I'm still struggling to understand how it can emulate a lid switch, but there it is. I'm planning a wipe and install of W7 ultimate before i give to the recipient.

As always, you guys are awesome!

Thanks

An update on this one. It's doing it again on that particular laptop, and even swapping drives, i wasn't able to fix it this time. Does anyone know where the lid switch is on the T500/W500? I can't find it.

I'm at a loss to figure out how to fix this one. When i press power, it just spins up the drives, then sits there like it's not getting anywhere. I never get a bios splash or any backlight whatsoever. The CD drive will spin up, and HDD will run for a second, and then it just sits.

Have you considered that you might have lost that magnet?
Go with a metal paperclip or similar all along the underside of the keyboard bezel.
If the magnet is still there, you should find it.
Otherwise ask someone with a T500/W500 to take a picture of it and its exact location.
The other option: find the Hall-effect switch on the T500 inverter/LED-board...

The magnet is still there. I found it. Still not working. I'm going to guess the inverter is dead.

86turbodsl wrote:The magnet is still there. I found it. Still not working. I'm going to guess the inverter is dead.

A dead inverter equals no picture at all in most circumstances. If the system were mine - and cost me more than $10 - I'd be returning it to the seller.

Your machine, your call.