Thinkpad A22m "issues"

[*F-BodyFanatic*]

I've been toying with computers all my life, but laptops still get me. I'm hoping maybe one of you have had a similar issue, and may be able to guide me to finding a solution.

I have a Thinkpad A22m 850mhz, 512 ram. Old notebook, but all I use it for is rare trips to access the internet, so it serves it's purpose enough not to run out and drop 500+ on a new one.

It's been having issues where it will lock up for a few seconds, and then go back to being fine, and a little later, do the same thing. On and on and on.

Other times it will completely lock up and force me to do a hard shutdown.

I've flashed the bios, ran anti-spyware and anti-virus software. I've tried using just 1 stick of ram at a time to isolate a ram issue. I thought maybe it was the hard drive since it was making a weird noise, so I got a new one as well. CPU? Mobo?

Anyone have a similar issue?

[Phazer]

I've read on here that many TP's suffer from dirty memory sockets. If you do a search, it will explain how to check them and clean them. Also, is the CPU fan working? It should spin up do\uring boot-up and occasionally spin when under normal usage. Maybe throw on a temprature program to see what temps it happens at. Just a few thoughts.....

[*F-BodyFanatic*]

I opened her up and tried reseating the CPU... no luck.

I forgot to mention I also have issues once in awhile where I will hit the power button, all the LEDs flash, and then nothing happens. I have to keep turning it on and off before it finally will boot.

[rkawakami]

Taking a wild guess, I would say you may have a problem with a loose crystal on the motherboard. This would involve taking the motherboard out of the case and closely inspecting all of the parts that have a designation of "Y1", "Y2", etc. A T23 of mine had a similar problem with (not) powering up and failing a specific PC Doctor test.

A power-up problem is probably NOT due to any memory issues but it wouldn't hurt to run memtest86+ on your system.

ref: http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=40648

edit: Sorry; referenced the wrong thread!

[ragefury32]

Is your Hard drive running in DMA mode, or polled I/O?

(To check, go to device manager, click under IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers and click on "Primary IDE channel". Under the advanced settings tab check Device 0. Is the current transfer mode PIO or Ultra DMA? If it's "PIO only", change it to "DMA if available" and hit "ok". Windows should prompt you to reboot. Reboot should fix the issue.)