Thinkpads Forum

My Thinkpad T410s is 1.5 years old, owned from new, but I only started seriously using it recently (on account of the low contrast screen, which I hate). It runs the Lenovo Windows 7 64-bit preload with all OS patches as well as Lenovo Update patches applied. The disk was replaced with an Intel X18-M. The BIOS is from mid-2010.

I was playing a video on YouTube and the machine completely flaked out. Screen goes black for several seconds, then returns, but isn't properly redrawn. Parts of the screen re-appear very, very slowly. Mouse freezes for several seconds at a time, then responds again for a few seconds. Delayed response to Ctrl-Alt-Del, about a minute or so. Unable to get Task Manager up. The screen kept blacking out, cycling every 20 seconds or so. I have never seen anything like this. The closest I've seen is on a desktop with an ATI graphics card, when the ATI card/driver has a crash and goes into "VPU Recover", during which time the screen blanks out. The laptop however uses the integrated Intel chipset (i5-520M CPU).

This happened once, thus far. Machine is back up, after a reboot. Has anyone else encountered this, any explanation or fix? Adobe flash is up-to-date, by the way. Perhaps the fix will be to disable hardware acceleration for Flash. I'm open to other suggestions however, especially if you've seen this or maybe read about it.

I haven't had this problem with youtube specifically, but I have noticed that the graphics card will "re-boot" when running some applications, leading to behavior very similar to what you describe. I have switchable graphics, and managed to get around it by choosing the right power saving settings. Not sure if this will help you or not - but you might try different combinations of power settings until the problem goes away. Basically, the video/power management on the T410s can be too smart for its own good.

I've had this problem happen to me once on my T410s.

Interesting replies, guys. Keep them coming, if you have anything to add. I've turned Flash hardware acceleration off for starters. If it happens again, I shall start to play with power management settings.