Thinkpads Forum

I just got a thinkpad 380z (2635-jgu)and can't get it to boot. When powered all the leds light then the battery and drive activity light turn orange and stay on. The computer will give an error beep most of the time (one long then one short). No screen activity is evident. I also get nothing out the VGA port. I have tried re-seating the video cable inside the computer and nothing look wrong or smells burnt. I checked the same cable inside the lcd housing and all looks good. I have even tried removing the memory leaving the on-board ram. Any suggestions are welcome! Thanks in advance.

http://download.lenovo.com/ibmdl/pub/pc ... 38zhmm.pdf

Symptom:Two short beeps and a blank screen.
Action:
System board

Symptom:One long and two short beeps, and a blank or an unreadable LCD.
Action:
1. System board
2. LCD assembly

Probably a dead board.

I had feared that. I totally gutted the system and everything looks fine. All parts are clean with no signs of overheating. I picked up a unit off ebay with a bad lcd but a working mainboard for little more than shipping. Not that a PII 300 can do much, but I hate tossing out a computer unless it is a lost cause.

harshbarj wrote:I had feared that. I totally gutted the system and everything looks fine. All parts are clean with no signs of overheating. I picked up a unit off ebay with a bad lcd but a working mainboard for little more than shipping. Not that a PII 300 can do much, but I hate tossing out a computer unless it is a lost cause.

Did you look for bad capacitors or a part that popped ( a hole in a plastic chip)? I recall an older ECS computer motherboard that looked like it was brand new, only issue (major one) was a small pinhole in the top where the southbridge chip blew up. Unless you were looking directly at it you would have never seen it.

One of my problems is that my part machines tend to get fixed up, so I try to gut anything usefull and toss the rest before the urge to fix it comes around.

A p2-300 is old, but if you have older software it is still useful. My fastest Thinkpad is only a 390E P2-333 since I try to collect 486 and P1 models mostly. Nothing is realy obsolete if you use the software of its era to mess around with.

Unknown_K wrote:
A p2-300 is old, but if you have older software it is still useful. My fastest Thinkpad is only a 390E P2-333 since I try to collect 486 and P1 models mostly. Nothing is really obsolete if you use the software of its era to mess around with.

A lot of the games I play are dos era games. Really into TES: Daggerfall. at total annihilation. Both should run like a champ on this once fixed.

I found the problem. Turned out the processor was dead. I bought a junk system off ebay. it turned out to have a bios password but the processor still worked. A simple swap of parts and I now have a working 380z. Oddly the battery is still good as well. I get about an hour use off it. Hard to believe it's 11 years old and still working. Next to find a version of Linux that will work on this.

It could have been a newer battery then the one it shipped with originally. Do you have a spare 380Z LCD (mine has a red tint for a few seconds on startup so I asume the backlight is going on it)?

Not a good one. The one I got with the junker has a dead strip about 20 pixels wide running from top to bottom.

And yes a red tint is a early warning that the ccfl is on it's last leg. I bought a t40 2 days ago that has that problem($50 shipped, not bad methinks). Simple fix really, either replace the ccfl or the lcd itself. The ccfl plug looks to be the standard plug found on all laptops (least all that I have fixed / parted) so I assume any old ccfl of the same size should work.

And I installed windows 2000 and while slow it is usable. I can play most of my divx movies with VLC player off a usb thumb drive (that sadly is twice the size of the HDD!). if I can find a 128mb sodimm I may give that a go as I'm stuck at 64mb now.