T410s woes

[FragrantHead]

My Thinkpad T410s is 1.5 years old, owned from new, but I only started seriously using it recently (on account of the low contrast screen, which I hate). It runs the Lenovo Windows 7 64-bit preload with all OS patches as well as Lenovo Update patches applied. The disk was replaced with an Intel X18-M. The BIOS is from mid-2010.

I was playing a video on YouTube and the machine completely flaked out. Screen goes black for several seconds, then returns, but isn't properly redrawn. Parts of the screen re-appear very, very slowly. Mouse freezes for several seconds at a time, then responds again for a few seconds. Delayed response to Ctrl-Alt-Del, about a minute or so. Unable to get Task Manager up. The screen kept blacking out, cycling every 20 seconds or so. I have never seen anything like this. The closest I've seen is on a desktop with an ATI graphics card, when the ATI card/driver has a crash and goes into "VPU Recover", during which time the screen blanks out. The laptop however uses the integrated Intel chipset (i5-520M CPU).

This happened once, thus far. Machine is back up, after a reboot. Has anyone else encountered this, any explanation or fix? Adobe flash is up-to-date, by the way. Perhaps the fix will be to disable hardware acceleration for Flash. I'm open to other suggestions however, especially if you've seen this or maybe read about it.

[buzzlight]

I haven't had this problem with youtube specifically, but I have noticed that the graphics card will "re-boot" when running some applications, leading to behavior very similar to what you describe. I have switchable graphics, and managed to get around it by choosing the right power saving settings. Not sure if this will help you or not - but you might try different combinations of power settings until the problem goes away. Basically, the video/power management on the T410s can be too smart for its own good.

[sir_synthsalot]

I've had this problem happen to me once on my T410s.

[FragrantHead]

Interesting replies, guys. Keep them coming, if you have anything to add. I've turned Flash hardware acceleration off for starters. If it happens again, I shall start to play with power management settings.