My T40p, which has been quite reliable until recently, has started to become unstable with a strange, repeatable issue. So far I can't tell if it's hardware or software.
After being on for a number of hours - variable, from a few hrs to >8 - the video becomes corrupted in a specific way. This leads to difficulty shutting down, risking file corruption. Details: The lettering, but not graphic content in the top window is replaced by straight lines or on one occasion Arabic characters. Taskbar buttons may lose their lettering. The battery icon almost always loses its numerals. Windows may lose their titles, but that tends to happen after the initial corruption. Task Manager will (usually) not launch but can be selected if already open. Some options such as Shut Down / Restart are greyed out in task mgr, though they usually work at least if attempted a couple times. Ctrl-escape may not produce anything, or it may provide ghosts of the log off and turn off options but with no lettering at all. If I catch it right away I have been able to shut down, but after a minute or two the only out is a hard reset. The screen does not flicker or go black, and the desktop icons seem to remain intact. After a reboot it runs fine, unless it had to crashed with a power cycle. In the latter case some program settings get flipped. On one occasion the display reset itself to 16 instead of 32 bit color depth - I hadn't touched the setting. Also strange is the the display settings gives me options up to 2048x1536, while the LCD is 1400x1050. Display Properties|Settings also seems to think I have multiple monitors, with the current one being capable of 2048. ATI PowerPlay applet, Displays tab shows the correct LCD panel tho. So far I've run PC doc tests from within windows and from a boot disk, though not extended times. I have run memtest for a few hours. Neither produced any errors. I also ran chkdsk and system file checker, neither found errors. I don't see any sign of a virus or other malware, at least nothing obvious. I have heard that this model has an issue with the graphics chip, but I've never heard of it presenting like this. So... at this point I am not sure whether it's a hardware or software issue nor of what is a reasonable way to diagnose it. Event Viewer comes up with nothing. I'll try deleting the video adapter in Dev Mgr and see what happens. How can I tell if this is hardware or software and in particular what is the problem? thanks! _______________________________________________ Thinkpad mailing list [email protected] http://stderr.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/thinkpad
