IBM Thinkpad R32 Hardware Malfunction help

[ygong]

I bought this IBM thinkpad R32 three years ago. It was working well. A year ago, I replaced the original 30G hard drive with 80G one. one of the two usb hub was broken for more than one year. Also a year ago, the power button sometimes didn't work well. Sometimes, I needed to press the power button many times to start the laptop. When that happened, I found that when the power button is pressed, I can hear it is powering up, but if it is just pressed for one or two seconds, it didn't power up the laptop. Two months ago, when the laptop was running, it just died with the following message
*** Hardware Malfunction
Call your hardware vendor for support
*** The system has halted ***
NMI: Channel Check / IOCHK

After that, this problem always appeared when the latop run for several minutes to several hours. First, I thought it was a virus, but I didn't find any virus using notron antivirus and lavasoft ad-aware and I also updated my bios to the newest version. Now the problem got worse, sometimes I cannot boot my laptop. Sometimes when I press the power button, it stopped at the first screen "Press F1 to enter BIOS setup", sometimes it stopped when window is booting up. Sometimes, I didn't even see the first screen for bios setup, it just hung up. I changed the BIOS backup battery and the problem persists. Can somebody please help me find out what the problem is. I am sure my hard drive is working fine because I can use it as a removable hard drive. When the laptop is powered up ok, I also used the pc doc for windows to diagonise my laptop and everything is fine. Recently, when I played dvd movies, the keyboard died, but the movie still plays. Then I used usb mouse to restart the laptop. I really don't know where to start to find out the problem. I opened the laptop several times, and I didn't see any loose connections.


Thanks a lot for your help

[AbsoluteRaleigh]

The R32 system board acts flakey before failing and that is most likely the root of the problems, going by the description...

[ygong]

Do you think I need to replace the mother board?
Thanks

[Mast3rbug]

Hi. I had the same problem with the Hardware malfunction, the mouse/keyboard not working, or stopped working, and the blue screen in windows XP. I tried a lot of things, and finally, I purchased an used R40. a few month later, I wanted to try again. I had an hard drive with VISTA installed. The funny thing with vista, no more blue screen.... Even when the keyboard and mouse stop working, windows continue to work. You just have to put an usb keyboard/mouse and you have a working computer. Now, I use it to stream video, make a game server, downloading torrents ect...

So, If you want to continue using the computer, just install Vista with minimum 512 meg ram, and it will work.