Faulty z61 motherboad? advice help needed Please

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Hi all i have posted a technical question about an issue with a z61 in the general forum as i wasnt sure where would be the best place as the issue may not be machine specific?
If you would be so kind to take a look & if you could help it would be appreciated thanks

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=95452

[sarbin]

since you get the 3 errors with or without a hard drive installed, the first thing i'd do is check the bios revision installed and see if there was an appropriate update. in case you don't have it, here's the driver matrix site for the z61t: http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... MIGR-64278

cheers


(moved my post here, as this seems like the correct forum. the mods may merge the threads.)

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Many Thanks for the advice,
Yes when i tried system update it mentioned updating the bios but as i dont have a working battery & it said i needed one, i didnt want to chance it. I would hate to 'brick it' especially if i need to return it, so it really puts me in a bit of a catch 22.
I am not too technical, I did try updating bios on a couple of much older machines manually(dont like to take too many risks on newer models) a while back with mixed results. 1 al went well, the other though still working seemed worse afterwards.

edit: It does look like it needs updating i have 2.14 & it is up to 2.27 now

[sarbin]

if you search the forum, there are a number of threads describing battery-less bios upgrades. not sure i'd try any of them on a machine i value. one thought might be to connect the cord to a fully charged and functional ups to protect against a power outage. probably would work as long as the cord doesn't get disconnected out by accident.

fwiw, i never let tvsu update bios on my machines. i use the bootable disk method.

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Thanks again, will look into the battery less bios update but wait to see if anymore advice comes in before making a decision unfortunately dont have ups charger & they are really expensive.
Interesting that you choose the disk method & not TVSU to update bios.
On the older machines i did the bootable disk method, but thinking about it now i did let TVSU do it on a x60s few months back. Wonder what the consensus is on this?

[sarbin]

there are some posts around here about doing the update from within windows or from the bootable disk. iirc, the failures reported happened while within windows. besides, i started doing these before it was even possible to do from a booted os, so i guess old habits die hard.