T40 Loosing Video Display

[SkipHK]

This is my first post and I hope I can get some good suggestions.

My Thinkpad is 3-1/2 years old bought new and now out of warranty. On a scale of 1 to 10 I am perhaps about a 5 with respect to computer literacy. I have replaced the the 802.11b wireless card on the laptop under tutelage phone support from IBM when it was under warranty and not reluctant to take it apart.

A few weeks ago the screen started going blank after about five minutes.... it takes three minutes to boot up. I put an external monitor in the side connector and it too went blank with the laptop screen. My fear is the video driver is going bad and I undersand it is a chip on the motherboard ... not a video card.

No other things were done to the laptop ... it just started gdoing this out of the clear blue.

Can you offer suggestions of things to look at?

Skip

[BillMorrow]

why is it taking 3 minutes to boot up.. ?
is the OS cluttered up with junk..
is the HDD running out of space..?

have you been able to get the display to come back without a reboot..?

do you have a backup..?
al

do you have a spare HDD..??? and the recovery CD set..?
if so, have you tried a clean install of the factory preload..?

we kinda need to see if this is a driver/software issue or hardware..
if hardware, you might be able to find a used system board..

[christopher_wolf]

Welcome to the Thinkpad Forums, Skip.

The system really shouldn't take 3 minutes to boot, is that something that pre-dated the screen-blanking symptoms? If so, it might indicate a driver problem where Windows cannot initialize the GPU hardware.

Is it possible to boot into Safe Mode? Hit F8 during start up and boot into safe mode, that usually rules out most software/driver problems from the get go. If, however, it is a hardware issue, then safe mode won't make much of a difference.

[SkipHK]

I guess I have just lowered my self assessment of my computer knowledge another notch. I should have thought about booting in safe mode and reverting back to previous restoe points.

Here are answers to point you all made.
1. I cut back on the start menus and deleted a bunch of rarely used programs. Start up is still a round 3 minutes...maybe a little less.
2. The HDD had 45 gigs of capacity left...only 15 is used.
3. Yes I have files backed up
4. I've not yet tried a clean install of factory preload. If I do that I may need some guidance. I am trying to avoid that until I can find out the cause of the problem.
5. Booting in safe mode definately allows the display to operate for a couple hours so far. This indicates to me the vieo hardware is Ok...ami I correct?

Since I did all this here is has happened IF I try to boot into regular mode.

A. It boots in about 3 minutes still (I have about 768 megs of ram)
B. After booting up it tries to send a critical error report to to MS the effect of Thread_Stuck_In_Device_Driver (Q293078) .
1. Manually decrease hardware accelleration
2. Install most current driver

I just not got a different error telling mt to update the ATI Graphics driver as it was not working...or something like that.

Question... Where the heck did ATI come from? i don't recall seeing that in the Progamm add/remove before... but, my memory may be off. There is an ATI Controll Panle program of 7.4 mbs, ATI display Driver of no mbs, and ATI Hydrovison of 10.3 mbs listed in the add/remove.

Could this be something unique to IBM or is that the graphics driver that comes with XP Pro/

If I am not even close with my questions or thinking I am thick skinned so please push me in the right direct with any comments! I do appreciate layman's terms in any feedback.

Skip

[SkipHK]

I've been messing with thing for about a half day and getting nowhere.

For sure the T40 runs fine in Safe Mode. I can even bring it up in Safe mode with Netwroking and do things there. All XP updates are current. I even have Explorer 7.0 now. It seems to boot up faster now that I have virtuallly eliminated most all the programs.

The system now crashes when I bring it up in normal mode after a few minutes. It then restarts.

I wanted to bring it up on the XP CDs but it won't read the CD. I can hear it clunk a little like it wants to spin up but... that 's it. I removed the CD unit from the T40 and it still crashes after normal start up.

Does it make sense to disable drivers on the T40 and bring them up one at a time? If, so how do you do that/