R61 vga problem (Quadro NVS 140M)

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budleut · #1 Post by **budleut** » Tue Nov 11, 2008 5:13 pm

Hi, I have a problem with my Thinkpad R61, with nvidia Quadro NVS 140M.

At first, I saw that its display had colour failure, which for some colour it's replaced by other colour. Then I plugged in external monitor, and the display was good. So I assumed that the problem was either on LCD or its inverter. So for a few days I used external monitor and turned off laptop's display.

Then after a week, when I was using 3D application (game), my laptop just stopped working. I used hard restart, and then I got blue lines on BIOS startup and also I could not access windows normally anymore. So I used windows safety mode, and it worked, no blue lines. When I restarted again my laptop, the blue lines were there and still windows could not be accessed. I thought there has to be problem with the driver. So I went to safety mode again and uninstalled vga driver. Well, I could now access windows wihtout vga driver however whenever I try to install new driver for the graphic card, the system just goes idle with blank black screen and I could only use hard reset. I tried also updating BIOS and using recovery system to factory setting, still it doesn't solve the problem. I still have blue lines on BIOS startup, I could not install graphic card driver, and I could only use external monitor -the shortcut button Fn+F7 could not turn on laptop's display.

So is this a hardware failure? What should I do to fix this problem? I would appreciate any comment.

Thank you very much.

ajkula66 · #2 Post by **ajkula66** » Tue Nov 11, 2008 7:53 pm

Welcome to the forum!

Your GPU is failing, no doubts about that. Call Lenovo if the machine is still under warranty.

Good luck.

budleut · #3 Post by **budleut** » Wed Nov 12, 2008 12:35 am

Thank you for your welcome and reply.

Unfortunately its warranty had just expired 2 months ago. It's a bit sad, because my father's T42 which is more than 4 years old doesn't have any problem until now even with pretty much the same workload.

Anyway thanks again.

dr_st · #4 Post by **dr_st** » Wed Nov 12, 2008 2:48 am

I know that some manufacturers offered an extended warranty (going beyond the warranty your purchased with the machine), specifically for problems related to the GPUs in this series, which were admitted by nVidia to be problematic.

Does Lenovo have something like that? You might be able to get it fixed for free, if so.

budleut · #5 Post by **budleut** » Wed Nov 12, 2008 1:34 pm

Hi dr_st,

Now that you have mentioned about similar problem with other manufacturers, I look into the web and found out that this series is considered as defective gpu by Dell and HP, and yes they offered warranty extension. However i could not find any information about the same service provided by Lenovo.

ajkula66 · #6 Post by **ajkula66** » Wed Nov 12, 2008 4:45 pm

Lenovo hasn't acknowledged nVidia failures as of yet...read Mark's response here:

http://forums.lenovo.com/lnv/board/mess ... d.id=21029

budleut · #7 Post by **budleut** » Thu Nov 13, 2008 1:52 am

That's a clear statement from their representative, a bit dissapointing.

Now I'm not really sure, what should I do with my laptop. I might have it repaired which would cost more than €300 for new mainboard. But no one knows if the same problem would occur again.

Well, at least I learn something important from this, one year warranty is not sufficient even for Lenovo products.

Thanks for your replies.

R61 vga problem (Quadro NVS 140M)

R61 vga problem (Quadro NVS 140M)

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