T500 Display Randomly Stopped Working!

[kipper91]

This morning, when I turned on my T500, the display did not turn on accordingly. Just last night, I was using the laptop as normal in my studio, and there was no impact or event that would seem to cause this behavior. I can't get the monitor to work at all today! The power lights go on, hard drive indicator and sound show that the hard drive is working (the computer sounds as though its booting normally.

This is incredibly distressing, as I am well into the quarter's work at a very tough university.. and losing commission of my laptop for a few weeks would be devastating. Also, it is no longer in warranty

Things I have tried, to no avail thus far:
Booted the computer with AC power only, battery only, and both
Took out and reseated the RAM
Tried Booting with one / each stick of RAM
All kinds of button mashing (fn+F3 as regular monitor command; tried sleep and hibernate)
Plugging into external monitor - I tried plugging into my rommmate's external monitor but right when I plug it in the external monitor says the message "Monitor going to sleep"

That last attempt is making me think the Thinkpad is stuck on that command to turn off the display.. But what could cause that?

For reference, T500 my setup is as follows
Windows XP SP3
Intel Core2Duo 2.53gHz
4gb DDR3 (2 sticks of 2gb each)
320gb 5400rpm HDD
ATI 3650 Graphics

The computer previously ran wonderfully, and although it is around 2 years old, it showed no signs of this ever before today. If you have any suggestions or comments thank you in advance, I just want to get this back and running so I don't get too behind in my schoolwork!

[Colonel O'Neill]

If you take out all of the RAM and turn it on, does it beep?

[Harryc]

It would not be uncommon for an external LCD to show no video if you just plug into into a booted Thinkpad. Try cold booting the Thinkpad with the external LCD plugged in. Also, on the Thinkpad screen do you see a faint image if you hold a flashlight up to it?

[kipper91]

If you take out all of the RAM and turn it on, does it beep?

I did try this (it was recommended in another thread) and yes, my machine did beep at me when it was booted without the RAM

It would not be uncommon for an external LCD to show no video if you just plug into into a booted Thinkpad. Try cold booting the Thinkpad with the external LCD plugged in. Also, on the Thinkpad screen do you see a faint image if you hold a flashlight up to it?

I see no image when I look close / with a flashlight. I will try booting with the external LCD plugged in once I get home, I haven't tried that.

[kipper91]

@ above idea: I tried cold booting with the external LCD and it was no different. Following are the events which have transpired since

Most recently, I opened up the case and found the CMOS battery (round, yellow one) unplugged and plugged this back in. When I booted after this, my LCD worked again! Temporarily.. Basically the thing beeped at me for having reset the CMOS battery, and it brought me straight to the BIOS. At this point I was excited and thought I had fixed things. I reset the BIOS date/time, and it juuuuust started to boot to XP, when I got hit with bsod. Now, whenever I try to boot, I'm back to square one (no display at all)

So basically from this I learned: LCD is working.. It did for a bit at least. And something in my bios/cmos is f-ed and unhappy.

Thank you all so far for the quick responses, and let me know if you have any more suggestions to try

[Harryc]

...I opened up the case and found the CMOS battery (round, yellow one) unplugged and plugged this back in.

We're not getting the whole story here. This would not occur on it's own. Was somebody inside the machine fixing or upgrading something? With the CMOS battery unplugged, even when the machine was working you would have been prompted to enter the date/time on every boot.

[kipper91]

We're not getting the whole story here. This would not occur on it's own. Was somebody inside the machine fixing or upgrading something? With the CMOS battery unplugged, even when the machine was working you would have been prompted to enter the date/time on every boot.

Apologies if I was unclear:

The problem honestly occurred as I said it in the first post. Reiterating, the computer was working fine, but then the screen did not turn on when I booted the next morning. No event or shock caused the initial problem
Fast forward 2 days of frustration from having an unusable computer, in which time I typed the original post.
Because of the need to get it working I was the one to reset the CMOS battery, and following was the event where the screen worked briefly and then once again became unusable.



Fast forward to my knowledge as it stands right now:
I think I've figured out that my discrete graphics card is the problem, and that my card (ATI Radeon HD 3650) may be dead. I got the computer working one more time since my last post and noticed it was working in integrated graphics mode. But when I tried to switch to discrete graphics, it promptly bsod crashed, and now I'm back to where I started (no display).

This crash is what leads me to believe it is the discrete graphics card, and why I can get no picture upon boot (because the machine is trying to boot with the discrete graphics) I know it was dumb to switch to the discrete graphics, but I didn't recognize that was the problem at the time. And now I can't get my computer to display anything at all. The CMOS trick no longer works to get it to boot

[Colonel O'Neill]

Try this:

Take off the keyboard, but don't unplug it. Apply firm downward pressure onto the heatsink while hitting the power button. If this works, hit F1, go into BIOS, and set switchable graphics to integrated only.