share experience: video problem of A30 fixed

[bigtiger]

I am now a big fan of IBM and have pursuaded many of friends to get a thinkpad. Actually I recently constantly buy from ebay for my friends.

Among the thinkpads I purchased, there is one A30 that got Video problem. There are strips on the screen when booting up and it may be gone once the computer started.

I checked this forum and deem this might be a connection problem around the video port. So dismantled the machine. Reseat the video port, the problem seems to be gone. But sometime it may come back. I then put some industrial tapes between the video card and the metal cover that goes above the video card. Now the problem seems to be gone with the additional pressure.

If you have this problem, you may try my method.

For your information, A30 seems to be notorious for this problem.

[slowbiscuit]

The A30 has different types of video onboard. Mine is an ATI Mobility Radeon 7000, and there is no metal cover above the video card, since there is no video card. It's just an integrated chipset on the mobo.

What I've read here and in other places is that a lot of the video corruption issues (vertical stripes and/or garbled text in DOS mode, red banding in some XP animation windows, black banding when playing videos in XP) are actually caused by bad solder joints on the mobo's video memory chips. In mine, I've confirmed this by running PC Doctor against the video - the memory was found to be bad.

I'm living with it because I don't care about garbled text in DOS (or the BIOS), and XP works fine with no real issues except for the occasional red banding in some animation. Living with the black banding playing videos is tolerable as well since I don't play them much and the laptop is otherwise fine for web usage.

[rceberl]

Thank you bigtiger, you save my life. I always use my a30 specially for watching dvds and media content, and sice it started with these video problems (two months ago), I was looking for something to solve the problem.

I dismantle the machine with the service manual I took from http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... MIGR-39796 and then, put two layers of 3m scotch double face tape between the video memory chip and the left ultrabay box. These layers provide some pressure in the video memory chip, and since then the video looks great.

Maybe this solution is not a perfect one, and some might call it a dirty trick, but what the hell, it works! And it probably will need constant repairs, but I still recomended because it´s running perfect for me for about a week.

Worth trying...