I have an old Lenovo ThinkPad T61 that stopped booting in September 2013. Immediately when you power it on, the LED indicators come on and the fan and HDD can be heard spinning, but it doesn't proceed further. Not even a flicker on the screen, with the screen completely blank and none of the keystrokes on the keyboard do anything.
It's one with an Nvidia discrete graphics that were known to prematurely fail due to a defect in the chip. More details here:
http://t61.wikispaces.com/home#nvidia
I suspected this is what failed, and figured after 5.5 years of use, it was time to replace it, so I got a ThinkPad T440p, which I use to this day, and never looked back.
Today I decided for fun to just see if the old T61 will power up, after 3.5 years, so I popped in the hard drive (I had removed it to copy files I had on it over to the T440p via an external enclosure).
Miraculously, it booted up just fine, and I was able to log into Windows no problem. After tinkering around with it for a few minutes, I shut it down to see if it would then boot up again.
It did not, back to the same blank screen, with just the LED lights on, and the hum of the fan and hard drive spinning.
My question is why was it able to turn on once, after 3.5 years, and back to being dead again? If it is the GPU failure, shouldn't it have just never turned on once after 3.5 years to begin with?
I tried removing the hard drive again, removed the CMOS battery, removed the RAM sticks, pressed the power button 10 times to clear it of any current, but it did not bring it back to life. Maybe it'll power up once again after another 3.5 years? 🙂
It's one with an Nvidia discrete graphics that were known to prematurely fail due to a defect in the chip. More details here:
http://t61.wikispaces.com/home#nvidia
I suspected this is what failed, and figured after 5.5 years of use, it was time to replace it, so I got a ThinkPad T440p, which I use to this day, and never looked back.
Today I decided for fun to just see if the old T61 will power up, after 3.5 years, so I popped in the hard drive (I had removed it to copy files I had on it over to the T440p via an external enclosure).
Miraculously, it booted up just fine, and I was able to log into Windows no problem. After tinkering around with it for a few minutes, I shut it down to see if it would then boot up again.
It did not, back to the same blank screen, with just the LED lights on, and the hum of the fan and hard drive spinning.
My question is why was it able to turn on once, after 3.5 years, and back to being dead again? If it is the GPU failure, shouldn't it have just never turned on once after 3.5 years to begin with?
I tried removing the hard drive again, removed the CMOS battery, removed the RAM sticks, pressed the power button 10 times to clear it of any current, but it did not bring it back to life. Maybe it'll power up once again after another 3.5 years? 🙂
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