T61 Crashing: Running out of troubleshooting options.

[guilldeas]

Hey so I'm trying to restore back to life an old T61 (You'll find the specs here: https://pastebin.com/ChMDV7vf), first things I did was swapping the HDD for an SSD, change the thermal paste and gave it a thorough airdust.

The machine runs okay but it's crashing unpredictably every couple of hours, I'll leave it playing a youtube stream for a couple hours and it will suddenly crash, no correlation to me doing anything. When it crashes the screens freezes, mouse too, Num Lock works but Caps lock and SysRq + R E I S U B doesn't, sound does not work either, I can see activity on the WiFi but not on disk. Only forcing a shutdown and rebooting brings it back.

What I've tried (to no avail):

• Install different OS like XP, Ubuntu and Mint, every single one crashed

• Look up it's GPU, it's an Intel Core2 Duo T7100, not the infamous early NVIDIA models that would crash

• Tested SSD and RAM memory health from BIOS but all tests passed

• Monitored temperature, no overheating

• Using stress-ng I stress tested the GPU, RAM, SSD, WiFi and CPU independently in an attempt to reproduce the crash and thus narrow down the error to a particular component, I could not reproduce it

• Looking at error logs in Linux at the time of the crash (you can find some of the error logs here: https://pastebin.com/4ga3LqJt and here: https://pastebin.com/LEYXK3KG)

• In the error logs I found some references to WiFi drivers iwlegacy and iwl4965 so I disabled both of them, and tested it with Ethernet connection, it still crashed

• I even went as far as to remove the Intel 4965AGN WiFi card as suggested here in some old posts, plug a WFi dongle, donwload it's drivers and test it but it also crashed... (side note this is why it's not listed on the specs)

I really don't know what else to do, any suggestions?

[kfzhu1229]

One small thing to note. On T6x, if your main battery is very dead (dead enough that the BMS can't even start properly), it can cause exactly that behaviour periodically, where the computer would freeze with mouse frozen and everything. This happened to a T60 I got for free with this problem and turned out it was the battery that was 0V dead that was the problem
Remove the main battery and try a 90W higher wattage charger and see if the issue persists

[guilldeas]

Hi kfzhu1229, thank you for your reply, I now realize that I specified a lot of info on the machine but failed to mention that I received it without it's battery and I've been running it from mains with it's original charger ever since, however you also meniton:

try a 90W higher wattage charger and see if the issue persists

Which raises an interesting point, what if the PSU in the now quite old charger is acting up and that's what's causing the crashes? I'll try to test the machine plugged to a healthier newer charger.