T40 with Memory Errors

[mstrjon32]

I have an aging Thinkpad T40 (2373-RU1) that has developed some rather serious issues. About a year ago the video stopped working, displaying only total garbage on the screen. I took it apart and reflowed the GPU, which worked flawlessly.

For about the next 6 months I went on using the system and had no issues. Then it started to get a little cranky if it wasn't sitting flat on my desk. For example, if I picked it up and carried it to the couch or tried to use it on the plane, the mouse motion would become jerky. It also wasn't happy about resuming from hibernate or sleep, occasionally crashing on resume. While annoying, these issues were tolerable.

Last Friday, after a week straight of 8 hours a day use, and a rather thorough inspection by the TSA (for whatever reason) the system wouldn't boot. Windows XP would start up until about the logon screen and then would throw one of a variety of memory management STOP errors. I let the system sit powered off overnight, and then started it up, and it ran for a while, and then I got another MM error and it wouldn't start again after that. I tried running memtest86, and it will run and without errors--until I pick the system up off the desk, after which it shows a few hundred memory errors and then promptly crashes.

I can only assume that the northbridge has begun to work itself off the board much like the GPU did. Has anyone else experienced this? Should I try to reflow the northbridge, or is there something else worth trying first? Also, the receivers for some of the screws in the palmrest have worked themselves loose, and the screws will no logwhich probably has resulted in the system flexing more. Has anyone else experienced this/found a nice solution. I could just buy another palmrest off of ebay but I'm worried it will have the same issues.

Any help is appreciated. I'd really like to keep this machine running.

[RealBlackStuff]

Welcome to the Forum.
Not the Northbridge, but the Southbridge could well be your problem.
See this post, if it helps: http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=77189