Thinkpads Forum

Yesterday, I was unfortunate enough to have a ThinkPad 760E U3L bestowed upon me. The screen is the brightest i've ever seen and he battery, despite the 1996 vintage, lasts two hours, but thats where the good stuff stops. It has a 120 mhz Pentium with no L2, the mWave soundsystem and a case that is slowly falling apart.

My current problem started after I booted it and Windows detected a "Composite Power Source" and installed the hardware into the registry. After that, the comp will restart and will not boot, Windows hangs on load, and I have to manually remove the "Composite Power Source" in safe mode to make the comp boot. The device manager won't let me disable the device, so I have this detection and deletion cycle. If anyone could help me with this, I'd be greatful.

Nevermind, I just installed the latest windows updates as well as manually change a few IRQ settings and my 2nd laptop functions just fine now. These computers, the 760 series, are the epitome of IRQ hell. Anyone who currently does or has owned a 760C, CD, E, DE, XD or 765D could most likely vouch for me on this.

IRQ hell...

I would say a 760 can do a lot of different things, but unfortunately not simultaneously (best example: Mwave). You have to disable the functions you don't need (at the moment) to use the rest. I have to disable the IR port PnP device in Win98SE to get my Cardbus USB2.0 card to work.

See here about my own 760EL/XD trouble:
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=33779

When I still had a 760, I normally kept the modem disabled (since I'm on broadband) and would keep a PCMCIA modem handy in case I needed dial-up. I also kept the option for second IDE device in docking station (see configuration utility) disabled since it ate IRQs and I didn't have a docking station.