R40e random power offs on battery power/ram issues

[IBreakThings]

A couple months ago I ordered a ThinkPadR40e (2.2GHz Celeron/14" screen/256mb ram/20gb hard drive) from a reseller that had gotten it off of a corporate lease.

It was a little worse for wear, with some cracks on the palm rest and a dead pixel or two, but for the most part it was in perfect shape.

There wasn't any OS install on the computer, so I borrowed a XP Professional disk and installed. XP didn't recognize a bunch of the power management features, and after I used Windows update to update their drivers, I started having my first issue.

At first I thought it was my battery, but when I put a spare in the same thing happens. When the laptop us on battery power, and reaches 94-96% battery percentage, it just shuts off.

I put a Ubuntu 8.10 live CD in to test if it did that on any other OS's, and it did it randomly.

In all of the... 8 or so Thinkpads I've owned, this has never happened. Any ideas?

Now for the second issues I found. The motherboard should support two sticks of 512mb DDR PC2100 RAM.

But it doesn't. It doesn't address even half of it, and when I tried different combos in different slots, even with the original 256mb stick, it only addressed 402mb of ram (in the BIOS).

The battery issue is so irritating, I might just pull out my 600E because that has a 3.5 hour battery life... not 1.2 minutes...

[Harryc]

I'd guess there is something amiss with the power management circuitry on the systemboard. It's unfortunate that you waited 2 months to use the laptop. The resellers warranty was...?

[IBreakThings]

30 days, unfortunately. Well, if the power management is messed up, I'll just deal until I can buy a new motherboard.

Could the improper ram assessment also be a result of the motherboard being messed up?

[ajkula66]

R40e units are infamous for being picky about RAM, and that's an understatement of the millennium...

Several threads on Lenovo's forum deal with this issue, and only one poster managed to get his machine to recognize a full gig, using some unknown (at least to me) brand. So, for the most part that's trial and error.

http://forum.lenovo.com/lnv/board/messa ... 6790#M5532

On your battery problem I'd tend to say that unless you have tested the machine with a brand new or a known good OEM battery, I'd tend to believe that the batteries in question are defective.

Good luck