R40 mobo swap, different LCD sizes

[bulletsneverlie]

I recently bought an Ibm R40 for parts, to replace the bad fan in an R40 I already had. Both are Ibm R40, type 2681. Upon arrival, I tinkered with the parts laptop, only to find it in much better cosmetic condition than my current R40. The screen is also bigger, and it has a faster CPU, bigger hard drive, and better optical drive too.

The parts laptop boots up to Win XP in safe mode, in normal mode it always locks up before it gets to the desktop. It often locks up in safe mode, and will sometimes cut off on it's own as well. I bought it with the knowledge that it has a bad system board, so I know that's the problem, and I know from my testing that the LCD, Hard drive, Optical drive, memory, keyboard, touch pad, and processor work, as well as the fan. The system boards are the same size and shape, all components, screws, and ports line up.

The PCI caddy sticks out further on the 15inch mobo, and I could swap it, but since I never use that anyway, I just left the short one on the board.

I swapped the 13.5in laptop's system board into the 15in chassis, hooked everything up, did a quick boot and shutdown to check it, and all appears to be well. I swapped out the 1.8 p4 for the faster 2.2ghz p4 too. I need some heat grease for the fan/cpu, and I'll be ready to use it.

Someone told me you couldn't swap mobo's between different sized LCD r40s, but I just did it, so there you go.

Do I need to change any settings, anything to look out for? This is the first Laptop that I've worked on.

[vanaya]

Welcome to the forum.

Have you tried to run diagnostics on the motherboard? I would suggest to run PC Doctor and see if all test pass, before you write off a bad motherboard. You can find the d/l here and burn the .iso.

It might be as simple as a installing a fresh os. Also since you have both R40, Swap the hard drives and see if you have the same problems with your known good hard drive.

[bulletsneverlie]

I tried swapping the hard drives, I got the same result. I put the mobo in my original computer for storage. I want to do more testing later. I did run diagnostics on it, but it said everything was fine. I got it from a computer repair guy, so I was taking a short cut by just believing him. You are right though, I do need to do further tests. I let you know if I figure anything out.