Breathing New Life Into A Dead Thinkpad Laptop

If you own a Lenovo or IBM ThinkPad laptop, here is a tip I found that you’ll want to keep in your back pocket in case it starts to behave erratically or drops dead completely.

I have an IBM ThinkPad R52 running Windows XP.  Since buying it over 7 years ago, I haven’t performed a restore on the system, kept the virus scanner up to date, and ran the disk defragmenter on it every morning religiously. The thing has been a solid performer. It ran like a champion.

I say “ran” because the battery finally gave up the ghost about a year ago. It wouldn’t hold a charge and I couldn’t run the system as long as the battery was in. So, I pulled the battery completely and simply ran the machine from the house outlet.

About 6 months ago, it started acting strangely. Pressing the start button would kick in the power, but the screen would remain blank and it wouldn’t run through the BIOS Power On Self Tests (the boot up tests that determine if the motherboard is operational before it starts to pull the OS from the drive).

After a few attempts, the system would eventually start, run through the POSTs, and then boot up Windows XP.

But the problem only got worse with time.

Also, leaving the machine off and in the carrying case for extended periods seemed to exacerbate the issue.

For a while, I thought the graphics controller had finally decided to call it quits, but the POST would have called that out with a beep code. This condition produced nothing but a spinning fan and a single power light.

After running a Google search and trying a number of different suggestions like dusting the system out, reseating the hard drive, pulling and replacing the memory, I was ready to finally bury my long-time companion.

That’s when I ran across this post by Mike Masnick, which, after thinking about some of the conditions involved, seemed to make sense.

Masnick had a Lenovo ThinkPad z61t, which exhibited similar behavior. He called IBM support and the tech support guy told him… well, you can read the entire exchange on Masnick’s blog here.

I don’t know if you need to do the whole pattern of pushing the power button 10 times in a row, but my little ThinkPad is operational again.
   
I’ll experiment with the resurrection pattern the next time I leave my ThinkPad in the bag for a long time and let you know how things work out.