Repair Laptop

Let’s say you have an IBM ThinkPad laptop and when you turn it on all you get is a black screen with “Fan error” message. What could be wrong?

A few weeks ago, the fan in my trusty IBM T42 bought the farm. This resulted in the unit heating up considerably, as well as numerous “fan error” messages on bootup. It eventually became so bad that to boot up at all, I had to blow compressed air into the fan’s exhaust grill for 5-10 seconds, in order to fool the BIOS and make it believe the fan was actually spinning.

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Do you want to replace the wireless card on your IBM ThinkPad laptop but not sure where to find it? Pictures posted on this blog explain how to open up an IBM ThinkPad laptop in order to replace the wireless card.
On some ThinkPads the wireless card is located inside the laptop and you’ll have to remove the keyboard with the palm rest if you want to replace the card yourself.

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Do you have an IBM ThinkPad laptop with a missing key on the keyboard? Not a problem, you can fix the keyboard without taking your laptop to a repair shop. It’s not even necessary to disassemble the laptop and replace the whole keyboard. If you have all the pieces from the fallen key, then the repair process shouldn’t take a lot of time. These instructions will explain how to assemble the key and install it back on the keyboard.

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Is it possible to make an older IBM ThinkPad T41p laptop a little bit faster? Yes, it is if you upgrade the CPU as it explained in this tutorial.

I learned that with a simple BIOS flash, the original 1.7 ghz pentium M “Banias” CPU (130nm process, 1mb L2 cache) that came standard with the T41p can be upgraded to a 2.0 GHz Pentium M 755 “Dothan” CPU (90nm process, 2mb L2 cache) which was available in the later T42 models.

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Do you have an older IBM ThinkPad laptop that came without internal wireless card and wireless antennas but has a slot for the wireless card on the bottom? Now you can upgrade your laptop by installing internal wireless card and antennas yourself using these instructions.

In this project we added an internal wireless adapter to a Thinkpad a31. This is possible since it shares the chassis of the Thinkpad A31p which included internal wireless and bluetooth, at the time, cost about $1000 more.

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Your IBM ThinkPad laptop screen (or any other laptop) went blank? Check out this article.

I could get the screen to come back on momentarily by toggling Fn-F7 a few times, but after about 10 seconds it went blank again. After rebooting, same thing — 10 seconds and blank.
Upon closer inspection, I noticed that I could actually see the windows very, very dimly on the screen. However, it was so faint I couldn’t see a cursor or read any text but the screen was definitely trying to project the image. So I hooked up an external monitor and the image displayed just fine.

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This guide will show how to open up the LCD screen on an IBM laptop and replace the failed backlight lamp (CCFL).

LCD panels become useless when their backlight lamps fail. It can fail as early as one year after production, but most units fail after three or four years of use. My ThinkPad T23 is a little more than three years old and its backlight started to show pinkish tone. Moreover it was flickering when first turned on. The symptoms usually disappeared after several minutes, but it became really annoying. So I decided that it is time to replace the backlight.

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I have an IBM T30 that has a video problem: vertical lines appear and no video…but works perfect on external monitor.. Changed cable and ensured proper seating of the connectors. Vertical lines different thickness with new cable but still the same problem.
Could it be a dead LCD display?
I hope it’s not the mother board!!

From my experience, if the laptop works fine with an external monitor then most likely there is nothing wrong with the motherboard/video chipset. It is still possible that you have a faulty motherboard but I doubt it. You’ve replaced the video cable and reseated connections but still experiencing the same problem so it’s not a video cable problem. Apparently you have a bad LCD screen.
Can you change thickness of the lines or even get video on the screen if you torque or move the screen a little bit? If yes then most likely you have a bad screen.

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This guide explains how to remove a broken LCD screen from a Lenovo X60s laptop and replace it with a new LCD screen. The display disassembly procedure will work for some other IBM ThinkPad and Lenovo laptops. If this guide works for your laptop, please mention the model in the comments.

Before you start, please turn off the laptop, unplug the AC adapter and remove the battery.

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Using this guide you’ll be able to replace or upgrade memory modules (aka RAM) in IBM ThinkPad T40, T40p, T41, T41p, T42, T42p series laptops. In my case I’ll be working with a ThinkPad T41.

This laptop came with 512MB RAM installed. There are two 256MB memory modules installed. One of them can be easily accessed from the bottom of the laptop. The second module is hidden under the keyboard.

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