T61P Grafics card broken... What now

[farbio]

Hi,

I am a student from Germany and I have the T61P now since three years and it is out of warranty since a year. Unfortunatelly the grafics card has just died yesterday. Something like this can happen but to such an expensive notebook from a reasonable manufacturer, in my eyes it needs to be covered out of quality and image reasons. I understand I am not much of a value to Lenovo as a private person but I have successfully recommended the Thinkpad products to four private and two enterprise customers. Anyways this was not so much of an attraction to the customer service either.

Anyways I will not be recommending Lenovo products from now on because of their accommodation. Other companies like Siemens, which take a lot better care of their costumers, are a lot more priceworthy...

Now my question would be where could I get a whole new board or is there any other solutions to that?

Best Regards,

Farbio

[Mornsgrans]

Maybe this (german) article will help you:

http://thinkpad-wiki.org/T61#Mainboard-.2FSystemboard-.2FPlanartausch

Try to get a fitting board with Intel graphics at www.lapstore.de.

[TuuS · Accepted solution]

I'm also working on a guide to fixing these with parts salvaged from the huge quantity of units on used computer market. 

Please also understaqnd that althought it's no comfort to you, but the actual percentage of failed units is stil relatively low, and lenovo did do a huge number of post warranty repairs, but this could not continue indefinitely, after all, used electronics do die, and the real beauty of thinkpads is by the time a rare failure occures, there is a huge quantity of used computers and replacement pars available for it.

Also consider looking for a replacement board from a late model T61/T61p with nVidia graphics, date codes 08/08, 08/09, 08/10. These should have GPU that is more reliable.

ps. I can send you the text of my prilimary guide (without graphics) privately, if you want to review it, send me a PM

[farbio]

Thanks for the responce. I took your advice and bought a used board with nvs140 for 100 EUR on Ebay. It works all fine again. The problem in my eyes is that the cooler is not propperly fixed on the GPU. I minimaly adjusted that for the future. Anyways I decided to sell it and buy a X61t since the GPU doesnt get the work done anymore... Now there is a little problem with that one as well, which I have posted in the tablet section.

[TuuS]

Glad you were able to fix it. It's nice to see someone get out of this situation without spending more then the machine is worth.

Good job