Thinkpads Forum

It's hot here and we in the UK are not used to it. It makes us even more stupid than usual.

I dismantled my T410 and cleaned the dust from the fan. I'm fairly used to doing this on X-series machines.

On reassembly the machine booted into Windows, then blue screened. Since then it has not booted. The fan runs and a couple of red leds flash, then nothing.
During my efforts, the room temperature was way above my comfort zone and sweat dripped from brow into machine. I think this water ingress fits the symptoms.

I have tried some basic things like battery out and wait and have also checked palm-rest metalwork for shorting.

I am thinking of letting the machine dry thoroughly then blasting with "air duster", but I'm never really sure what the propellant is in these canisters and what effect that might have. Any suggestions for things to try or checks to make, gratefully received

Well, replacing the 4GB ram module brought the machine back to life.

Squirting "air duster" at the failed ram made no difference, so I took it to the bathroom and gave it a good wash in cold water, shook it "dry", blasted any remaining droplets with more air then left it overnight to dry out fully. This morning I installed the failed ram back in the machine and it runs fine.

I'm fairly confidant that the sweat that dripped into the machine while working on it was the original cause - some did fall into the ram area. I will definitely work more carefully in future.

When ram has failed in the past, I've never thought of giving it a good wash.

CPUID now reports temperatures of around 40degC as opposed to around 100deg C before I cleaned the fan.

So James Bond you are not? We Yankees often assume every male from the UK is Mi6 trained and skilled like Q. My guess is that you didn't properly seat some of your components while cleaning out your T410. Glad you are back up and running.

Actually, I'm old enough to have taught Mr Bond everything he knows, if only he had asked. Now I spend my time worrying about hair falling under the keys and, as I said, sweating when stressed by trying to keep track of where so many different sized screws go in the T410.

I'm fairly certain that the problem was contamination on the ram module. The machine was running with the problem with all screws out, and the good and contaminated ram were swapped several times. Both modules looked clean, but washing definitely did the trick.

I've been looking at CPUID HWMonitor a lot today. On both the T410 and the X201, under utilization I see it lists CPU0, CPU1,CPU4 and CPU5. Seems an odd numbering system.