x24 booted up, but screen frozen

[wchen10]

Dear members,

I have a question to ask. I have a x24 which I love it a lot since 2004. But since two weeks ago, the x24 can boot up, and after like 5 minutes normal running, the screen suddenly changed to either all blue, or all vertical areas like rectangle areas with different colors, or all horizontal lines with different colors, then it dies no response with any keys, or "ctrl+alt+delete", but the light of reading disk was flashing. After I reboot it by pressing its power button, it can boot up again with normal, and after like 4 minutes this time, it died again showing me different or weird colors. I feel it was getting worse if x24 was hot, then I only have like 30 seconds after it normal boot up.

My x24 has 1.13G, 640M, winxp with sp2.0. I upgraded its display drivers during its five minutes normal running, but the issue still existed. Before the problem happened, I did several times(more than 10 I guess) to connect my x24 with an external monitor (I never did this before) and I changed its screen resolutions (so right now the boot up screen was much small than its usual of 1024x768), that was all i think may cause problems.

Another weird things for this x24 although it has been acted in two years -- I can not switch users, I had two accounts of winxp, once I switched users, after I login using another user, the computer automatically shutdown and reboot. But if I logged off one user and logged in with another, then everything was ok. This have been at least two years, so I do not think this caused a problem.

What can i do to save her? I really love this laptop, really.

Thank you so much for any help or suggestions, comments.


Sincerely,
wchen10

[wchen10]

forgot to mention, the same situation happened even I connected it to an external monitor. i tried to boot up it with different ways even in Ubuntun mode, it still died after 5 or 6 minutes normal running after it booted up.

[galactus]

Hello,

Have you tried pressing F8 after bootup and go by that way to vga-mode? That normally do strange things to your computer.

[wchen10]

yes, after this problem happened, I tried the VGA-mode to fix it, but it did not work; Before this problem, I did not.

thanks.

[galactus]

Well, one other thing you might done allready? but go to safemode and try switching resolution from (640x480) to 800x600 and 1024x768 backward and forward couple of times maybe that would do the trick!

[Thinkpaddict]

Hi,

You point out these symptoms:
- 1: Computer freezes appear to have a direct correlation with temperature.
- 2: Using an external monitor doesn't help.
- 3: Using a different OS doesn't help.

From this, I think that unfortunately you have a video card issue. Probably the high temperatures are causing the video card to lose some connection with the system board.

I would try to do this: Try to tighten the screws on the underside of your thinkpad (do not overdo it, just tighten them slightly.) See if that works. You could also try to tighten the fan assembly screws (but I don't know if this would have any effect in the video card contacts with the motherboard in an X24.)

After doing that, you might also want to update your BIOS, but you might want to do this only as a last resort, because if your computer freezes during a BIOS update, you will most surely brick your computer.

The good news is that second hand X24s are extremely cheap in eBay right now. I love my 2 X24s (writing this on one of them.) I hope your problems are sorted out.

[Thinkpaddict]

Do you know around what temperature your computer is reaching when it freezes? I can compare it with the temperature that I get in my X24.

[wchen10]

thanks, how can i get the temperatures?

[Thinkpaddict]

Hi,

One of the best programs to do this is MobileMeter:
http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/Sys ... eter.shtml

It is a simple executable, so there is no installation required. Just download and run the executable. You should be able to monitor your CPU frequency, CPU temperature, and HD temperature. Let us know what you find out!

[AlanHK]

Possibly a RAM problem, I had similar symptoms on my desktop a few weeks ago, turned out to be a bad piece of RAM. Or maybe just the contacts are not clean.

Assuming you have a removable RAM chip, take it out (leaving 128 MB soldered). The system should boot, though more sluggishly.

If it runs stably with the RAM chip out, that's your problem. If the contacts are not bright and clean, try polishing them with an eraser and reinserting and see if that fixes it, otherwise replace. Get a 512 MB chip and max it out.