Thinkpads Forum

I wonder if others have experienced problem like this or know a cure/workaround to it...

I bought a Mini Dock Plus Series 3 for T410s to give more I/O, most notably DVI outputs.

However, to my terror I immediately noticed the external monitor connected via DVI now suffers from occasional blanking. It goes black for about 1-2 seconds. Sometimes this occurs twice in a minute, sometimes it seems to be working ok 15-30 minutes or so.

Both DVI outputs of the dock share same behavior. Monitor (Samsung SyncMaster 225BW, resolution 1680x1050) and cable are fine and have always worked and work perfectly with other computer. Also the VGA output of T410s works fine, except picture quality is not so good.

From forums.lenovo.com I noticed several people have ran into same problem, but found no help there.

Try a shorter and/or better shielded DVI cable or try displayport.

Thanks for the idea! Probably I will test the DisplayPort when I am able to locate a high-quality DP-DVI cable.

My current DVI-DVI cable is under 2.0m long, looks rather ok and has ferrite rings too, so buying another one doesn't attract me a lot. I will try to find other DVI-DVI cables for testing somewhere.

I tested my T410s also with friend's display and quality cables using both DVI and DisplayPort interfaces. His monitor did not go blank like my Samsung, but instead the bottom part of screen kind of "twisted" occasionally for a while. With DP it seemed to work fine, but we tested it only 15 minutes or so.

So I bought a DisplayPort to DVI adapter, but did not solve blanking problem for me. Maybe blanking does not occur just as often now, but I am not sure.

Looks like warranty is the only option? Or just suffering... There is plenty of warranty left, but this is rather frustrating because
1. Apparently this is a rather common problem (on other forums many have reported similar symptoms) but I have seen no reports of any kind of remedy.
2. Sometimes the T410s & display work many hours perfectly fine. However, sometimes the blanking happens many times in one minute. It is possible the problem is not even recognized!
3. I found Lenovo support/warranty procedures in Finland confusing and complex, and I bought the machine from another country so I can't rely on the seller support either.

If you boot up a Linux Live CD does this blanking occur there as well?