Thinkpads Forum

My ex has my old TP600E and it is doing something weird I hope someone can help.
Let me start by saying the laptop isn't here physically with me.

The problem started last night. She was using the laptop when it gave a slight pop and shut down. She told me some of the problems and I helped her along with it.
Here is the issue:

When she turns it on, pretty well nothing happens. The light for the battery blinks when the AC is plugged in. When she powers up, the indicator lights blink and then nothing. I had her unplug the battery and when running off AC, the charging light is blinking and it does not power up.
Now the weird part: twice, she was able to boot the computer up and she was able to log into windows. The first time, after logging in, it died. The second time, I had her unplug the AC from the back and it died as well. In both incidents, both battery and AC were plugged in. This is after it has been sitting for a couple of hours.
It appears that after a while the battery pulls enough power to power up the laptop and then it will die and she can no longer get it to power up.
Running the AC alone, it will not boot up. Running battery and AC it booted up twice after sitting a while then it will not boot up after initial power up.
If I remember correctly, she tried it with just the battery and nothing happened.

Any ideas to what to check?

Q: Can she say where the pop sound came from? Was it inside the laptop or away from it? My thinking is that it was away from the laptop and came from the AC adapter. It might be that it is putting out just enough voltage/current to trickle charge the battery, but not enough to fully power the laptop. If you (or she) has another AC adapter I would give that a try. First try AC only, then with the battery also installed. Another question to ask is if she smelled anything different after the popping noise. A faint burning 'plastic' smell may lead you to the source of the pop.

(edit: BTW, welcome to the forum!)

Ray, she stated that the pop came from within the lapop. She didn't mention anything about anything like something was burning. The wierd thing is that it did boot up twice after it happened. But not immediately after.

Ijust asked her again.She is not 100% sure if the pop was in the laptop. But that does make sense. If the power supply is shot it very well might be trickle charging the battery.
I will give that a try.

Thanks for the help.

Unfortunately in cases like this you may have to remove everything that possibly can be removed (disk drive, CDROM/DVD, any PCMCIA cards, memory modules) and then see if a bare laptop can power up (with errors of course). Then add in one piece of hardware at a time and power up again.

If someone can check the AC adapter's voltage output with a multimeter that would help to eliminate/confirm if that is the problem. Barring that, replacement is the only other solution.

Other questions: When the laptop was/is running, what is the status of the battery icon in the system tray? Does it report a low, medium or high charge at first and/or does it drop real fast to zero? Is Windows setup to drop into standby or hibernation mode on low power?

Unfortunately the laptop isn't here with me. It's about 1000 miles away!!
The computer has not been up long enough to check the battery icon. Of course, I have all of the equipment to check everything so I may have to have her send it to me.
I do not know if it is set to drop off into standby or hibernation. From what she is stating, it just drops into nothing with just the battery light blinking.
I am pushing towards a bad AC power supply. That makes sense if it is getting a trickle charge and could be slowly charging the battery.
Let me check a little further (buy a new AC power supply) and reply back if this works.
Thanks again for the help.

Update - Well, after much hair pulling and testing, I finally got a text message last night from the ex-wife. She stated 'she used the wrong plug on the computer'. I am not sure what that meant and I didn't ask further what she did wrong.
The laptop is working fine. Chalk this one up for user error.
Thanks to rkawakami for helping out.

My guess would be that she attempted to use another AC adapter with the 600E. Since the laptop is reportedly working fine, most likely the adapter was the wrong (lower) voltage and not reversed polarity. The "pop" she heard may have been something in the power supply that couldn't handle the current being drawn by the laptop.

I have a similar situation with my Gateway AC supply; it puts at 19VDC while the IBM adapters are 16VDC. However, the Gateway plug will not fit in the TPs but the IBM plug will fit in the Gateway laptop. I have labelled the plugs with a paint pen in the cases where there may be some confusion on my desktop.

No problem with the help... that's what we're all here for.