I would like to say thanks to Tuus for his assistance in obtaining a replacement system board for our T61 that had a failed nvidia chip. We missed the Lenovo deadlines and were on our own, Tuus made it easy.
He supplied a board with the Intel chip set and the fan/heat sink. When the board arrived I pulled the unit down to nothingness and rebuilt. It took about 2 hours form start to finish. I looked at the lenovo repair training videos for a few wire routings and generally everything went well.
One item of note is our unit is a wide screen and it has 4 screws for the hinge. The video does not show two of the four, but it was not a big deal to find the empty holes.
The board booted and I set the requisite bios settings and we were off and running. The graphics came right up no problem even though drives were not loaded. I let it update through the thinkvantage update and windows update. Took an eternity (note to self run the thinkvantage update more frequently). The Intel gpu drivers did not automatically load, so I went to the lenovo downloads and installed them manually. No big deal.
The machine is up and running and the Intel gpu is more than adequate for our needs.
To those who have some ability, do not be afraid to go this route. It is doable and you can save an otherwise nice piece of equipment.
