T400, Advanced Dock 2503, Windows 7 64bit, Matrox M9140 LP graphics card

[mauisnj]

Hi -

We have a couple of advanced dock 2503's with T60Ps running Win XP that have been working great with a Matrox M9140 LP quad card and 6 screens for years. We have also successfully used x32's with the Dock II and Matrox G450's quads. Our T60p's are faltering with age and one of our software programs now requires Win 7 to run. Since we are on a really tight budget and have spare advanced docks and graphics cards we are trying to upgrade to refurbished off lease T400's which are the supposed to be the last 14" T series supported on the advanced dock 2503 along with the 15i"T500. So now, we are trying to dock our T400 with Windows 7 with the same configuration and the laptop will not boot on the dock.

The T400 starts to boot, does not even get to the Thinkpad splash screen with nothing ever appearing on any of the screens, shuts down, then starts to boot again and repeats this over and over.

The computer will boot fine on the dock without the Matrox card installed. We have not installed Matrox drivers yet, as the correct procedure to get a graphics card to work in any Thinkpad Dock, including the advanced dock to work has always been to first change the BIOS Display Primary Video Device to PCI Express then put the laptop on the dock, then boot, then install the drivers. (After that you can change the bios setting back and run 6 screens - lcd, vga out of dock , and 4 off the matrox card). I don't think drivers would install anyway without the machine having already recognized the card.

Just out of curiosity we tried hot docking the laptop and the result is that the laptop screen will work along with the screen hooked up to the dock's VGA port. Device manager however does not see the Matrox card.

Don't know if the problem is Win 7 64bit, the T400, or both. If we had extra HD's and extra copy of Win 7 and XP I'd try installing 7 on a t60p, and XP on the T400 to try to determine if problem is T400 or Win 7. We've been searching the internet and the forums here for the last few days and found others with similar problems, but with no success.

Almost forgot, our T400 is 2417-TRU and does not have the switchable graphics/ATI card.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[mauisnj]

Hi All,

We tried every setting we could think of and nothing made a difference. Then I remembered reading a forum post that someone was having problems with having too much memory in thier machine and not getting it to boot, so I decided to try removing one of our 2 x 2GB memroy chips from the machine and it's booting and we were able to install the drivers for the graphic card and all 5 external monitors!!

Does this mean that we are going to be limited to 2GB on this machine? We had 3GB in the T60p's we were using.

Does the advanced dock have some type of max memory in a laptop that it can work with when there is a graphics card in the dock and if so, what is it? We really can't run windows 7 64 bit on 2GB of memory without running into problems.

Thanks

[RealBlackStuff]

I never work(ed) with docking stations.
But check the RAM modules for being the correct type.
Up to 2x4GB=8GB of PC3-8500 a.k.a. DDR3-1066.
If you have any Value-RAM modules (such as Corsair or Kingston), replace them with better ones.

[Pokrzept]

To be honest I did used Adv.dock with my T400 and 8 GiG of RAM installed in it and it worked like a charm together with an Radeon 6570. Like an RBS said please check your memory modules first and try to upgrade your BIOS to the latest version available.