600e boots to external monitor amd XP problem

[db1]

Hi

My Nephew has a 600E, with a dead battery, that has a couple of problems.

1) When switched on or rebooted it *always* comes up on the external monitor, even without one plugged in.

2) He has put XP on it. As soon as XP starts to come up the backlight goes out and stays out.

I have put on the latest video drivers from IBM & the latest Tpad utilities but am baffled. Some have talked about setting the primary display but I see no way to set it.

TIA

[whizkid]

I hope someone can give you more useful answers, but I'll chip in.

The external monitor issue sounds like your system board is confused. It is either getting a signal that a monitor is connected by a short or open; or the ThinkPad is just plain confused. Either way, it sounds like the system board. Fortunately, system boards are plentiful and cheap and easy enough to change... and it's not such a pain if you don't boot if often.

As for the screen going dark, I've heard of this problem before and it got no good resolution. A few people (including myself) thought it was the inverter. The display is driven at different frequencies between text, VGA and XGA modes, and I thought the inverter was starting to fail and wouldn't work in XGA mode. That turned out to be wrong, as a new inverter didn't fix the issue.

Try this: Change graphics mode to 800x600 and also 640x480 (which is difficult in XP) and see if you can get the backlight on.

Also, try a bootable CD that will go into XGA mode like Knoppix (at http://www.knoppix.net/). If that works, then it's an XP or ThinkPad configuration issue.

[Guest]

SOLVED

To summarise the problems.

1) Tpad *always* came up on the external monitor.

2) When booting XP backlight goes out and does not come back on.

Tried a knoppix bootable linux cd - Perfect so it must be XP
Googled a bit and found a similar problem on M$ knowledge base with regard to hibernation - fix was to apply SP2.

However...... Decided we did not really need XP on the Tpad, so first we tried 98. That got about three reboots into the install and crapped out. Rummaged through the CD drawer and came up with 2000 - Installed, using external monitor for simplicity. Final boot without monitor - same problem as XP. Googled again but this time for "thinkpad 600e backlight windows 2000" Got a hit of someone else asking back in 2002. The answer was "old problem". The BIOS AOM conflicts with that in Win 2k. Turn off the BIOS APM or "jiggle the switch that the lid presses when it shuts" which will get it back for that boot. Sure enough after some poking with a biro - on came the backlight. As I could not find out how to turn APM off in the BIOS - You certainly can't do it from "easy setup" I thought it worth turning of as much as possible in Win 2k power settings.

The result is two fold and odd. The Tpad now *always* comes up on the LCD - and win 2k is fine. I suspect that the switch might have been sticky or something and was causing the monitor/LCD problem and the power saving has fixed the backlight going out when 2k boots.

We did not have the stamina to re-install XP and see if that to was fixed, in case it failed and we had to install 2k again.