T42 refuses to work after club Med...

[ziloo]

Hello ThinkPals

After a few months of being off for vacation,
my functioning T42 with green battery light on
refuses to boot!!

Any suggestions....

ziloo

[Neil]

It's not clear to me whether it was you or the T42 that was on vacation for a few months.
Anyway... what does refuses to boot really mean? Does the T42 power up? ThinkPad splash so up? Or...
if no signs of life at all, I would try pull battery out, disconnect A/C power and press power button a few times to drain any residual charge from the circuits. Reapply power and see if anything changes. Long shot, but just might work.

[ziloo]

> It's not clear to me whether it was you or the T42 that was on vacation
for a few months.



> Anyway... what does refuses to boot really mean? Does the T42 power up?

No powering up...dead as a door nail....

[ziloo]

__

It is a good opportunity to bring up an old question I had:

Does the green light on the battery also means
adequate current from the battery also...?


ziloo

[Neil]

Hmm... there is something really weird going on there. I've never known of a ThinkPad lighting up the green battery indicator when powered off. "Dead as a door nail" would not display any indicator lights. We may have to look in a different direction to trouble shoot this one.

Have you tried booting with battery removed? I've seen faulty batteries do strange things before.

[ziloo]

> ... I've never known of a ThinkPad lighting up the green battery indicator when powered off. ...

mebe I didn't explain it well....the battery light was yellow after I plugged in the charger,
and after 12 hours the blinking green light was steady green. Then I tried to power
the system up and nothing happened...absolutely nothing.

> Have you tried booting with battery removed?

I removed the battery, and then I plugged the charger in and tried to power up
the system and again nothing happened (I hope I haven't fried the mobo )

ziloo

[Neil]

Let's see... the power button is on the keyboard, so maybe try remove the keyboard and re-seat the connector. If you have a dock, see if the T42 will power up using the dock power button. Just guessing here, but maybe something else to try.

[ziloo]

Thank you Neil for the insight....

I proceeded with spraying a little bit of electronic contact cleaner
around the on/off switch... and lo & behold... the switch started
working again. However, the next morning the magic was gone and
the switch was Kaputt again.

Can we fix the on/off switch

ziloo

[Neil]

It could be that a heavy build up of crud and fuzz is preventing contact. A good blast of compressed air might just do the trick.

[kfzhu1229]

Can we fix the on/off switch

Pretty sure these power switches are actually rubber dome buttons pressing against membrane of the keyboard. It is possible that the power button trace became too corroded to work reliably (i.e. having like 100Ohms of resistance or something). To fix the problem you might have to redraw some traces on the membrane keyboard and you might have to tear the top plastics of the keyboard surrounding the top 5 buttons, and then get a conductive ink pen and draw traces.