A31p (2653-R3U) - Intermittent Problems

[ethink]

Over the past 5 weeks my A31p has begun to experience intermittent problems, specifically it freezes and locks up.

The machine has been in dailiy use for the past four years as my primary, personal desktop. It has always been extremely reliable.

It is running Windows 2000 with the latest Service Packs. It has the latest BIOS (1.10, 1NET16WW) as well. It sits in a 2631 docking station

Over the last 5 weeks, I have begun to experience the following problems:

1. The Power Management option (turn LCD off after 10 minutes while on AC stopped working). But when I insert a SanDisk USB Cruzer "thumb" drive into the docking station USB port, the power management option will begin to work correctly.

2. The CD-R/DVD was not recognized by Nero SW as a device in the A31p; the same CD-RW/DVD device works in the docking station and my ThinkPad t23.

3. The Win 2000 Screen Saver will initiate if set to intervals of less than 5 minutes; however for intervals of more than 5 minutes it will not initiate.

4. The Intel SpeedStep applet sometimes generates messages that it cannot manage the CPU speed

I checked the Windows 2000 registry via Norton Systems Works 2003 WinDoctor and MS RegClean. There are no reported Registry problems.

A search of this Forum shows that other A31 owners are experiencing similar problems. It appears that my A31p motheboard and/or ATI video card may be overheating and causing these problems

My machine is STILL under IBM /Lenovo Warranty; I purchased an extended (2) year warranty approximately 18 months ago.

Should I send it in for repair? Please advise.

This has been a great machine, but this problem is really driving me crazy!

Thanks for any insights about this problem.

[ryengineer]

Send it to Lenovo, why bother experimenting when you still have warranty left.

But if you like to do anything yourself then I suggest on doing a clean install of your OS provided if you still have all the rescue and recovery CD's then see if the problems still persist because as far as I can see these things seems only software related to me.

Also on your current settings time your system temperature at near freezing periods. Here (right click and save target as) is a small temperature measuring tool.

[ethink]

I have noticed that the freezes appear to happen when there is graphical based activity on the screen (e.g. Web Pages, Ad-Aware scans, Norton WinDoctor scans). The problem does NOT happen when using Outlook.

Based on these observations and the reports of others on this message board as well as the ThinkpadDigest forum, I think that the video daughter card and possibly the planar board is beginning to fail.

The machine will be going to IBM EzServ for service tomorrow.

I will update this forum on the resolution (I hope) of this problem.

Steven