Thinkpads Forum

I dusted off a 600x that I have and installed winxp last week. Everything looked good, but I noticed that there was a lot of dust and bits of crumbs in the keyboard (my daughter's college computer). Not having an air duster, while it was off, I turned it upside down and tapped on it to get most of the crumbs and bits out of the keyboard.

Well after doing that, I turned it on and got at first the memory check which was ok, but then a partially scrambled screen with error messages 173, 169 (not sure). Got to a new screen with and bird pointer that had a choice of cancel or ok. I clicked ok and the laptop rebooted with again a partially scrambled splash screen with the memory check and IBM logo, followed buy normal start up of Winxp.

Everything works fine after Winxp starts. The only problem is the scrambled initial IBM splash screen. WHat happened? Did the tapping loosen an eeprom or something. I would think that the bios info is loading ok since Winxp starts up fine and works fine.

I don't understand whats wrong. Thoughts?

I would doubt the tapping did anything that wasn't already done, but the 173 ("Configuration data was lost") sounds like you need a new CMOS battery to begin with. It's in the RAM enclosure on the bottom of the computer, and you can either replace the whole thing, with the wires and plug, or cut the shrink wrap off the old battery, carefully pull off the metal tabs with pliers and then tape them tightly to a new CR2025 battery. At any rate, the battery should yield 3.0V more or less.

After you do that and reset the system time and date in the BIOS, at least part of the problem should disappear (with luck all of it).

There's no mention of a 169 error in the HMM for the 600X, so I'm not sure what this could be.

Yes, that was the trick! Thanks Robbyrobot. I changed the cmos battery using your trick with the cr2025 battery and all is well. No more scrambled startup screen.

treodoc wrote:<snip>... with error messages 173, 169 (not sure).

Robbyrobot wrote:There's no mention of a 169 error in the HMM for the 600X...<snip>

Most likely it was 161 and 163 errors.