System board failure

[didiode]

Hi -
I have an Thinkpad R51 laptop.

I left my machine powered ON during weekend and had been out of city. There was heavy thunderstorm during that time and when i came back home, my machine was dead and wouldn't boot at all.

I sent my machine back to IBM, they say Systemboard must be replaced.

I had Belkin's Surge Protector also attached to my laptop. That didn't help at all.

Is there any other way to protect my laptop(other than totally removing power cords) ???

I'm really worried.

[K. Eng]

Do you know for certain that it was a lighting strike that caused your R51 to malfunction?

There is no completely foolproof way of defending plugged in devices against direct lightning strikes. Making sure your home is properly grounded and the use of a uninteruptible power supply system are two things you can do to reduce risk.

[pphilipko]

You could get a surge suppressor instead of a surge protector. There's a slight difference, and a suppressor tends to be safer.

[jdhurst]

I once had a direct lightning strike a my home (before there were personal computers). I can say the more than one item was damaged, so evidence of lightning was highly noticeable.

In cases of thunderstorms and nearby lightning, surges in the power line should normally be contained by the laptop power adapter. Otherwise, I think you would have seen other things damaged. The ThinkPad adapter is good to 240 Volts, and most (certainly not all) home electronics are 120 Volt devices.

Does IBM say the system board was surge damaged? There may have been another reason which was coincidence at the time.
... JD Hurst

[fschwep]

Lightning does not have to strike directly at your house to damage a pc or other electronics. It can strike half a mile away and the surge through overhead powerlines and phone lines(!) may be powerful enough to damage a modern motherboard with its high-density chipsets. Very often it will be the phone line that transfers the surge into the equipment, and in such a case the power adapter will be useless as protection. So will the UPS or surge protector/suppressor, unless the latter has protected phone and/or network jacks as well. Current must be able to surge through your equipment, meaning it needs both an entry point and an exit - usually any other hardware connected to your precious laptop, such as a modem, printer or scanner, in turn connected to the grid.
The only safe way is to unplug everything that is hooked up to your Thinkpad, if lighting strikes are likely (and of course if you leave the house for a while. It helps if the house is well grounded and has its own overall surge protection in the main fuse box (usually a 40 to 70 kAmp surge suppressor), plus a surge protection device on the phone line where it enters the house. Even then you'll need to 'cascade' with lighter surge protectors/suppressors near the equipment you want to protect.
Last year I lost my trusty A22m when a single lightning bolt struck at maybe 400 to 500 metres from our house. At the time, we had basic surge protection for the house (which is extremely well grounded with a long loop of copper dug about 80 cm deep all along the house), the laptop was connected to an APC UPS/surge protector, and it still froze with a grilled motherboard. Later it turned out that the multifunctional printer/fax/scanner that was connected to it at the time suffered as well: it lost its fax and scan functions, in short everything that needed to communicate with the outside world. Earlier, I had lost ISDN switchboxes at two different occasions. We now have surge protection for the phone line as well, I have added a portable Belking laptop surge protector to the whole cascade, and the home insurance payed in full for a shiny, all-singing new T42 and a new multifunctional (the old one still works as a copier), so I guess I came ut of it fairly well... after a horrid month of having to unpack and old W98 desktop and install it amongst stacks of construction materials and moving boxes on our as yet unfinished first floor, stringing power and phone lines upstairs (I had been using the A22m in a corner of the living room as the house was still unfinished and I lacked true office space), installing all my software on that old clunker to be able to work and then again reinstalling everything on the T42 when it finally arrived.
So: UNPLUG, unplug and unplug. Especially if you leave the house for longer than a few hours. At the very least unplug the power cord and ensure that any connected equipment is truly switched off and powerless. And unplug the phone line from the modem.

[beerak]

afaik Belkin offers insurance automatically. I have APC and it offers 10 000 euros cash in case of failure and full refundation of any damage caused by surge protector§s malfunction. I am sure Belkin offers the same insurance.

[d lehmann]

fschwep knows his lightning.
Was hit recently and never got further than the dsl modem, but lots of other property damage.
There is a lot of misinformation concerning lightning and the bottom line is you must unplug to be sure.
U of Florida has a lightning test center and thru testing has found that the best possible protection even with lightning rods on the roof only prevents 20% from entering a household.
It can jump across open elec circuit breakers easily.
It can run hundreds of yards underground along pipes and wires.
The list goes on and on.
As far as ups insurance, apparently many claimants cannot collect.