T60 widescreen - screen blackouts/reboots

[danh]

I've got an issue that i've been dealing with at our company ever since we started buying the widescreen T60s in 2007. We randomly have reports of people's video freezing up/blacking out, most of the time the users aren't doing anything other than clicking around in Outlook, or something in AutoCAD (we're an architecture firm). Hardly anything too demanding on the video cards. The machines only can be powered off by holding the power button for 10 seconds, they are totally frozen.

Here's some specs on the units and notes:

- these are 8744-5BU T60 15.4" widescreen units, they are 2.0ghz Core2Duo with Radeon X1400 video card.
- 2GB of ram, most of the time it's either kingston or lenovo ram - i've tried swapping memory which seemed to reduce or solve the issue on some laptops, but it still happens occaisionally
- the video card driver.. i've tried many different revisions but at the current time it happens even with the latest ATI driver from lenovo's site
- bios is at the latest revision or 2nd to latest
- most workstations with the issue are being ran with a monitor, but not all


this problem continues to be so frustrating for me as desktop support , it's driving me insane, as i've tried almost everything I can think of to stop it from happening... sometimes it's in spurts where the user will have 3-5 reboots a day and lose lots of work.

I've never called IBM about it because I doubt they're going to solve it. They'll probably tell me to restart our corporate image from scratch with a restore CD and do it all over again but I don't think that's going to solve it.

Anyone have any experience with this problem or ideas?

[gauldin]

I have exactly the same problem on my T60. At random times, the screen will lock up for a few seconds, then go black. I have to power cycle to recover. Happens with both the T60 display and when an external monitor is being used. I've tried to make sure I'm running the latest video drivers, but no difference. Usually happens at least once a week, sometimes more. If anyone knows a solution, I'd love to hear it.

Mark

[sentiono]

Few questions:

1. Is this is a clean install or an installation from recovery / pre-installed one?
2. Memory - are they 2 x 1Gb or 1 x 2Gb. If the first case, are they the same manufacturer and type numbers?
3. Are there any settings on the power options (monitor off after x minutes, or such)?
4. Are there such screen savers turn on?

For Gauldin:
- is your external monitor profile been correctly loaded? on monitor's adapter profile (control panel - display properties - settings - advanced - monitor)

[gauldin]

On my part, the installation is as it came from Lenovo. Don't know what the memory is - I've never opened it up. The problem occurs when I'm running just using the laptop screen as well as when I'm using the external monitor, so I don't think the monitor settings would be an issue. The power manager settings are "ThinkPad Default" - it's set to turn off the display after 25 minutes idle when plugged in (which is how I'm usually using it when the problem occurs) or after 5 minutes when running on battery. I'm always in the middle of doing something when it happens (anything from email to Powerpoint to solitare), so it shouldn't be going inactive (it's also set to go into Standby after 25 idle minutes, which it does with no problem). In fact, the problem *only* happens when I'm doing something - I never come back to the computer to find it locked up, but instead it freezes in the middle of a mouse motion or when redrawing the screen.

[r. aster]

Dan,

You might search this forum for videoprt.sys. There are a couple hotfixes that update this module that seem to seem to improve stability and also the containing threads have other ideas on graphics problems with T60s.

Good luck,
RA