Thinkpads Forum

Well it appears my trusty W700 2757-CTO may have gone to the great thinkpad cemetery in the sky.

I was alt-tabbing between work (word documents) and play (a game of Borderlands, shooter), and it appears an overheating issue has laid me low. Everything seemed fine, although in retrospect I should have noticed that the GPU/CPU fans were blowing warmer air than usual.

Suddenly, the computer shut down with no warning, just everything black, no leds, no buttons do anything. First thought was that somehow the AC power cord had become dislodged and I'd wiped out the battery, but that was not the case. As I picked up the laptop, I noted that the bottom and sides where the CPU/GPU fans are (left and right corner under the LCD screen) were warm to the touch, and worse, I could smell that "hot plastic" smell coming out of the machine.

I got some compressed air and blasted out the vents, and a fair amount of dust did come out. However, there were no signs of life - not even the AC power icon that you'd normally see green when the laptop was plugged in.

So I hoped letting it cool down overnight would bring it back, as I had read that some laptops have auto thermal shutdowns to prevent damage to the system, but in the morning, still nothing. Pressing the power button has the battery icon under the LCD momentarily flash orange, and the plug icon momentarily flash green, then nothing.

I tried two different AC bricks in case that had gone bad somehow and the battery was dead, but still nothing.

As a last resort I hoped that maybe there was a connection problem where the power cord plugged into the laptop, so I tried mounting the W700 in the mini-dock I use at work, but again nothing.

So I'm afraid I'm screwed, seems like something amongst the motherboard / GPU / CPU melted/died/whatever, and my W700 is now a paperweight. The behavior very much reminds me of when I bricked it during a BIOS update a year or so ago.

But now it's out of warranty, so I am left to ponder if I should attempt a fix (will not be cheap I know) or give it up (buying a new W5- series is not in the cards right now due to the even higher expense). The file system itself is okay, I pulled out the hard drives and mounted them in a dock, so I can pull my files out, but it would be hard to give up a machine that has a better screen resolution than anything else out there right now.

Anyone have any thoughts on if there's anything I can do, or what may have gone wrong?

Thanks for plowing through the long read.

sorry to hear about your machine.
did you smell any kind of burnt resistor odor, or was it just the 'hot plastic' smell?

i have an x61t that died similar to how you describe, although i definitely got the burnt resistor smell. i immediately unplugged and let everything cool down, even though it wasn't really hot when it died. no joy, though. the machine was dead. i opened it up and tore it completely down, and sure enough, the burnt point on the planar was obvious. i chose not to fix it, as i've got other machines. just going to part out the remains.

if you feel adventurous, you could get a hold of the hmm for your machine and start by pulling the keyboard and bezels to see if anything is obvious.

eta: found the hmm, if you're interested.
http://download.lenovo.com/ibmdl/pub/pc ... 442_07.pdf

Honestly, I'm not sure what the smell difference is between a resistor and hot plastic, so I can't really answer that part. Seemed like plastic to me though. But most likely I will tear it down if nothing else, for curiosity if not parting out.

Thanks for the link, saves me having to go out and find that.

when mine fried, it was a real acrid/burnt smell.
if you find it's an obvious motherboard fault, someone here may be able to help source a replacement for you. lots of good folks and experts lurking about.

I recommend that everyone vacuum (not blow) the dust out of all the vents on their machine as described below, once a year, or you can burn up your laptop.

MSR_Steve, the areas you describe as being hot agree with the GPU overheating due to dust-clogged vents (the GPU produces more heat than the CPU). If it gets bad enough, you may actually melt the solder on the GPU, which presumably could cause a short, killing the laptop. The dust in the air inlets on the bottom of the machine is impossible to see without shining a flashlight into the slots, so most people don't realize that they're clogged (the slots directly below the center of each fan clog first and are the most important). It's a silent killer.

BLOWING dust INTO the laptop with compressed air will cause that dust to eventually be redeposited onto the heatsink fins, which makes them unusable. It's better to use a crevice tool (the vacuum's long narrow wand) to vacuum out all the little vents in the bottom, rear, and sides (first TURN OFF [*NOT* sleep, standby, hibernate] the laptop and unplug all cables from it, of course). That's unless you're going to disassemble the machine and blow the dust out of the entire fan compartments.

I have to vacuum out the vent slots in my W700 every year or so, or else I start to get thermal shutdowns (I also vacuum the keyboard, which is also an air inlet, and hold down the keys with my fingers to stop them from being sucked up). As you've seen, you definitely want to prevent thermal shutdowns from happening. Same thing happens to other laptops. Sorry to see you get nailed by it.

I agree that a 15" laptop is no replacement for the W700, and I'm starting to look at Sager/Dell/HP 17" machines. The main thing that bugs me is that you can't get a built-in display right now that's both wide-gamut, and has 120Hz refresh for 3D (which I need for demos) -- OLED-based displays would provide all of that and more (the Super-AMOLED display on my HTC EVO 3D phone beats the Retina MacBook Pro's IPS display in brightness and viewing angles in my own side-by-side tests). But they aren't yet available. Plus the Mac laptops are the only ones with 16:10 displays, all others unfortunately being 16:9.