Thinkpads Forum

Hello,

A few months ago my mother's T500 keyboard broke. Luckily we had an old R61 and it appeared that its keyboard was T500-compatible so I swapped it in.

During this swap something may have happened that (among other things?) erased all BIOS settings including a reset of the real time clock, no clue why/how. (I've done plenty of keyboard swaps and other minor maintenance like this.) Anyway, that seemed minor. I set the clock back to something reasonable and left the other settings on their reasonable defaults.

However, ever since then, the laptop is unable to stay shut off. Worse, if you leave it unattended and Windows tries to suspend the machine, it ends up powercycling instead. We had to disable auto-suspend to avoid getting the machine stuck in an infinite unclean-shutdown loop.

Has anyone else had a problem like this? I guess we'll just need to replace the board and/or laptop, unless someone here has a good idea..

It sounds more like you probably swapped out the keyboard, while the machine was still running...
Anyway, it could be something as simple as replacing the CMOS battery.
If you find them too expensive on the web, visit any local pharmacy and get a CR2032 battery.
Take the old CMOS battery apart and put its cables onto the new battery (watch + and -), use tape to insulate.

The 'Hardware Maintaince Manual' for the T500 says voltage for the CMOS battery should be 2.5v - 3.2v.

I'd remove the CMOS battery, regular battery and power adapter. Press and then hold down power button for 15 seconds. Connect AC adapter, turn on machine set date/time.

See what happens. I was thinking CMOS battery and/or windows driver.