760EL, Two Problems

[pirateofcapeann]

I have two problems with my 760EL The first problem is that it seems to take forever to power up. I have to turn it on and let it set for 20-30 minutes with the “thinkpad” start screen showing. The “task-bar” LCD above the keyboard shows that it is trying to read both the hard drive and a floppy disk at the same time then it drops the hard drive and looks for just the floppy. After sitting like this for a while, I can turn it off and back on and it will start normally.

I use this computer to run navigation software, hooked up to a GPS and ships power aboard my sailboat. The system works great but this start up issue takes too much load on my minimal battery supply.

If I can fix that problem I’d like to tackle the other one.

What is the definitive answer to the problem with the cardbus situation. I’ve read that this computer requires a 16 bit card and that it is set up to use 32 bit cards. I read that it needs an updated BIOS and that those that have updated their BIOS still have card instillation problems. I would love to put a Wireless-G card in this thing or even just an Ethernet or USB so I may go on-line to get the latest updates and such.

Thanks a lot for your help in this matter.

Gardi

[AlphaKilo470]

Put in a boot disk and see how fast it boots from that. Also, when turning the machine on, hold F1 while you are turning it on and hold F1 until you see the Esay Setup screen. From there, go into startup and make sure you have the boot order set the way you want. Also, if you can, try getting ahold of a different hard drive and seeing how fast the computer takes to boot from that. Chances are that either your motherboard is dying or your hard drive is dying, or oyu could be lucky and have it simply be an issue with your machine configuration.

As far as CardBus goes, it does work in the 760 series. I have a Xircom RealPort 56k modem + 10/100 lan that uses CardBus that I use wherever wireless networking is unavailible. You just have to enable CardBus to use CardBus cards. You enable CardBus by going into the ThinkPad configuration in Windows and clicking PC Card and in the window that should pop up, there is an option to enable CardBus.

[SeanM]

Sounds to me like a hard drive problem, like Alpha said. If you have a CDRom drive in the machine, try removing it; if it's going bad, that could be your problem also.