Help: T41 lockups at Resume, or Wireless enable/disable

[dozer]

I now have my wife's 'new' T41 pretty much fully configured....all drivers installed....everything working good....being used daily now.

Only problem is, it's been locking up occasionally; and in a way that I do not think is caused by a bad mainboard. It isn't happening randomly.

It's a repeatable event; which I've seen at two different times so far:

1) Upon resume. I.e., hit ctrl-F4 to wake it up, and after a couple seconds it puts the win2K logon window up...but the cursor and keyboard aren't working. Also, I can't get to it over the network; which leads me to think windows has entirely locked up.

2) Upon enabling or disabling the WiFi card (Cisco). Using the systray icon to bring up the WiFi manager, then select 'disable radio', and it DOES disable the radio, but the keyboard/touchpad goes dead at that point.

Here's a fun one: It has also locked up once when I enabled the WiFi radio on MY laptop!! i.e., NOT the thinkpad itself, but another laptop across the room!

fwiw, during the day or so of setup process, I did put it to sleep and Resume several times, without problems. It -appears- that the problem began after installing the wifi drivers....but I don't have enough time/cycles on it either before or after wifi install to make a definite statement in that regard.

Config is: 512mb, 40gb, cdrw, clean OEM Win2K install, drivers from IBM site 5 days ago, and installed by IBM Software Installer pgm.

2373-7JU9-9BT2RM, bios 3.06F, emb xtrol 3.02, IBM/Cisco Wifi

I'd be grateful to hear from anyone who's run into a similar problem....and also to hear how you solved it of course!

[FTC]

Hi, this looks like a power management related issue. I would start by updating BIOS and the power management driver to last levels and see what happens. Your sympthoms sound very familiar to me from 2-3 years ago, and I can grant you I never switched mainboards and my systems have been OK since long now, so in any case as you say it is most probably a software and not a hardware thing.

[toad]

You might want to consider switching OS?!?

I just got a T41 and put Kubuntu (linux) on it. Installation was a breeze, everything bar the modem worked straight out of the box (which I assume your wife won't need a lot seeing she's on a wifi network) and I can suspend to RAM and hibernate to disk as many times as I like.

Also, there are no viruses, no spyware and no defragmentation to worry about. Only problem is that if your wife is a gamer, she won't have much fun with her normal window games Apart from that I have found it to be a a safer and faster environment.

In case you need the modem, I got mine running within 5 minutes and would be prepared to help anyone else

[dozer]

toad: you've got to be kidding...

FTC: thanks for responding. All drivers came off the IBM website 6 days ago....so I'm pretty sure they'd all be the latest versions. I do plan on updating the BIOS...if I can figure out a safe way to do so. I don't have a floppy drive for this machine...but I'm thinking of burning a bootable CD with the bios update stuff on it...

[coreman]

Dozer...I found out the hard way that sometimes the latest drivers aren't always the best...case in point, I updated my T41 from Win XP SP1 to SP2 last Aug, with all the latest drivers and firmwares.

I started having problems with my wireless connection (2100 3B) staying connected even though I could see I had a strong signal.

After a month or so of workarounds, including "Repair"ing the connection ever (10) minutes or so, I uninstalled the 2006 driver and installed a 2005 driver...PERFECTOMUNDO!! Problem was fixed and has never recurred (*fingers crossed*).

Also after the SP2 update, I began having "Hibernate" "Sleep" mode lockups and strange events...they began one day when I closed my lid (set for Hibernate upon lid closure) and went to see a customer. In 1.5 years of SP1, never had this problem occur but it happened within a month of installing SP2...

I reinstalled the ATI video driver and fixed that problem...perhaps you could try an older ATI driver as well...

[toad]

Well, it was a long shot, admittedly. But if you want a safe system that works well there is no way round it

Anyway, hope you sort it out with what you've got on there.