Thinkpads Forum

I have a Thinkpad 600 that I am trying to install an operating system on. I turned it off to eat and to take a break. While I was easting, the 600 beeped and turned on by itself. It was still plugged in and the power light was the only light left on. What would cause it to turn on without anyone being near it? Perhaps it is 'possessed' and this could be why I am having trouble installing an os? This has happend one time at night and it was not plugged into an outlet.

I believe it is possible to set a wakeup timer, so it can resume from suspend at a certain time. It could also happen when the phone rings, or when the network tells it to wake it, or rather, when the thing THINKS one of those things is happening for whatever reason.

Or it could be possessed.

Check in Control Panel > Scheduled Tasks. You could have a program in there to wake the laptop up. I've used mine like this for an alarm clock.

Another possibility is that if the laptop was in suspend mode and the battery charge got low enough, it may wake up in order to go into shutdown.

Well, it does not appear that he could get into control panel because he is trying to install windows and hasn't gotten that for yet.

My suggestion is to stay with the computer (don't leave it, so at least you can see when and why it's rebooting) during setup and occassionally touch the red trackpoint to keep it from going into some kind of suspend mode. Either that or you have bad memory or other trouble...like a CMOS battery that is going south.

Good luck.

MadeInJapan wrote:Well, it does not appear that he could get into control panel because he is trying to install windows and hasn't gotten that for yet.

I understand what you are saying, but the OP's post is a little confusing. Who would turn off a computer in the middle of a Windows install? I would think the install would fail. On the other hand, someone might have Windows itself installed, but none of the updates applied yet. He might be saying he is in the process of Installing Windows.

I have tried different operating systems; eComStation, ReactOS, and FreeDOS. None get very far. The hard drive does not have any operating system on it but it is partitioned. I have not tried Windows. I will give it a try. It is when the TP600 is totally off/shutdown (as far as I know). It would suddenly boot. It has only happened a couple of times. Once when it was plugged into the power adapter and once when it was not. Both occured when I did not expect it to.

I would suspect a faulty power ON-OFF button, or perhaps a short on the system board. Never heard of this before (of course that doesn't necessarily mean much).

If you have an ethernet cable attached, it would be possible to send a 'magic packet' to the ThinkPad 600 and wake it up, if the BIOS was set to wake on LAN. You might be able to do this also with the modem if it was connected to a phone line. These things are what whizkid was referring to. I've only read about this, I am not that familiar with it.