A48 Black Screen of DEATH!

[damiankw]

Hi,

I manage a medium sized network (approx 200 notebook/pc's), amongst them are A4? and A5? ThinkCentre's, maybe twenty or so of them.

Over the last couple of months I've had five of these machines die on me in exactly the same way, as described below. I'm currently in Australia, not sure if that makes a different to anything, but it's increasingly frustrating having all of the computers drop off in exactly the same way for no apparent reason.

When switching the machine on, it doesn't seem to register to the video at all. From what I can tell, the machine is loading, the system itself seems to load up and make all the right sounds, however nothing at all comes up on the display.

I've done the obvious swapping around of monitors and cables but none of this works. I haven't yet swapped out any of the drives or put in a secondary video card as I haven't had the time or resources to do it.

Does anyone know if this is a known problem for these model machines, is there a fix or are they now just heavy paperweights that I can no longer do anything with? At the moment I can't rely on any of these machines in fear they're just going to die, which isn't a good thing - even with the age of these machines.

Any help at all would be appreciated.

- damian

[lead_org Microsoft MVP Contributor]

which exact machines do you have? A48? What is the MTM?

How old are these machines? and are they located in Australia?

[damiankw]

MT-M 8982-A48 has come up at least twice. I can't get to the information on the others at the moment though.

I'm not sure on the exact age, but I would say they are over four years, located in Australia (Melbourne)

Thanks for assistance.

[Mornsgrans]

Please find this knowledgebase-article:

http://forum.lenovo.com/t5/A-and-M-Series-ThinkCentre/Indeterminable-errors-on-NetVista-ThinkCentre/...

Maybe that is the reason.

[damiankw]

That does sound like what's happening. I'll have to check the systems to see if that's the issue though (won't be able to for two weeks when I'm back there!)

Although the machines are so old, having this many pop at once sounds pretty strange, all machines are spread out through the environment - different internal climate / usage / surroundings.

I wonder if it's a manufacturer issue they will help me out with

[lead_org Microsoft MVP Contributor]

You got the ThinkCentre A55, which is around 5+ years old now. Don't think Lenovo warranty support even have parts for these sort of machines.