X41T impending death?

[tsservo]

I've got an X41T that's been a trooper for years now. In the past few weeks however random little glitches have been popping up. First it stopped detecting external monitors, refused to get out of 800x600, ran slow, randomly rotated the desktop 90 degrees (that was a fun one). Then it was all OK. Then it wasn't. Sometimes all in the same day.

Very recently it started that stuttering mouse thing it hasn't done in several years since I did the first clean install of XP and later Win7. Recently the above problems became more regular and since I was (desperately) hoping it was a software problem I did a clean install of XP SP3 this past weekend.

I did run the PCDoctor boot-CD and did the thorough check, which turned up nothing.

Stuttering mouse problem didn't go away with the clean install, it ran really slow on boot and randomly really slow during use, though the graphics were behaving.

This morning the screen just turned itself off and was replaced with a terrible high pitched whine that remained after a forced shutdown by holding the power for 10 seconds (!). Pressing power again did no good, but pulling the power and the battery for 30 seconds got it to reboot, albeit slowly.

Does anyone have any potential good news or ideas for what I fear is a new motherboard (or an excuse to get an X201T)?

[ZaZ]

Some of the symptoms point to the hard drive, but it's kind of hard to say. The drive in the X4x machines are terrible. Maybe you want to run HD Tune on it. Do you need an excuse at this point? The X201t is an excellent machine, which will offer much better performance over you X41t, though a more expensive option than a new drive.