T61p exhibiting 1 long and 2 short beep and black screen

[Giang]

Thank you for your reply eecon.

I am sad to hear the boat is already sailed... I already bought a 3 year extended warranty when I bought my T61.

Do you think, I still could buy a Post-Warranty then?

Haven't repported anything yet.. just called the danish Lenovo support for asking them if they knew about the no-cost "post-warranty" repairs and they didn't. But he checked the serial to see if the warranty was expired. Do you think he would make any remarks on that in their system?

[mixz1]

Just a quick update. After two failed system board replacements while at the depot, which amounts to a total of five replacements since its August 2008 purchase, my 6459 is still at the repair depot. 31 day and counting. Meanwhile, one month of its extended warranty, purchased before it failed, has been eaten away. I wonder if there's a way to recoup that?

[unclemike65]

Hello All. I have a 2007 T61P and it looks like my vid cip/board just crashed. It simply won't boot up--I Have power lights but nothing but a black screen. 

I'm way out of warranty and reading through all this it seems that my best bet is to move on. But I need to get data of of my hard drive. Is there any way to get this thing to boot up, if only for a short time?

Thanks for any help in advance.

[advancedsi]

Easiest way is to buy a cheap hard drive/usb adapter for $10-$20 and connect the laptop drive to a known working desktop or laptop via that USB connector.  Useful tool to have.  Sadly, my t61 sits here dead as well with similar issue and it's the Intel video, not nVidia so no idea what happened.

[eecon]

Or .... If you know someone who has a working T61 or T61p simply swap in your hard drive to their main bay ..... it will boot-up into your Windows and let you write to an external disk.

Or .... Purchase an inexpensive working T61 or T61p (preferably with warrranty left or eligible for adding a $150.00 Post-Warranty Maintenance Agreement) and simply insert your hard drive into the main bay and continue on as if nothing happened.

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[dsavard]

Well, I just called them two days ago and they were of no help. They even were not kind enough to give me the nearest authorized service center address. They just told me to use bplocator.lenovo.com while saying them I cannot access the web since my laptop is dead. Really bad service, I never think they would dive so deep in service quality. I remember IBM service was once renowned as the best in the world. Obviously, with Lenovo it's no longer true.

So, to summarize things. How can we order this mainboard? I will do the change myself, but I need to order a brand new mainboard. I have a T61p type 6460-67F, the one with the nVidia GPU, the T7500 at 2.2GHz. I can even manage to order it in USA if needed.

[dsavard]

The used inexpensive T61p or likes are selling around 500$ and nobody knows how long they will last. Seems a poor move to me. It may solve the current problem by providing a working system, however this is only temporarily. It may be wiser to spend dollars on a brand-new system and copy stuff or buy a brand-new mainboard if any available somewhere, which seems not the case.

HELLO LENOVO, are you still selling this mainboard? How many bucks and where can we get them?

[dsavard]

Finally got some answers. Talked with Lenovo support, was referred to IBM Hardware which is responsible in Canada for spare parts for Lenovo. Then, asked for the system board part number 42W7853 which has been changed to 43Y9048. This is the system board for the machine type 6460-67x where x is any digit or letter. They are selling the brand-new board (good for about 4 yrs given the experience of most of us) at the retail price of 1685$CDN. I would get a complete latest laptop Intel Core i7 dual or even quad core with 4GB RAM or more at least for that price. Someone is insane somewhere at Lenovo and/or IBM.

The whole used laptop can be found on eBay for about 500$, used system boards for about 200$ (however, who knows how long they will last). And I found brand-new system boards for about 400$ from remarketers.

Seems we will have to go elsewhere to get some kind of respect as customers. AMHO, I believe, provided Lenovo was knowing these mainboards cannot last long due to bad heat management and/or bad chip design from nVidia, they should have at least offer system board replacements at reasonable pricing for the impacted models or offer a whole laptop replacement with an equivalent model.

[jedisurfer1]

hey I don't feel like taking apart my laptop but in CPU-Z it says it's a G84 Revision A2.  Is that the new or old one, or most likely we can't determine it? 

[eecon]

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jedisurfer1 wrote:

hey I don't feel like taking apart my laptop but in CPU-Z it says it's a G84 Revision A2.  Is that the new or old one, or most likely we can't determine it? 

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You can not determine the bad vs. good Nvidia GPU with those numbers.

As been stated on this forum many times before (BTW, the search function still works), you need to spend 10 minutes to lift the keypad and remove the fan/heat sink assembly to read the date code stamped on the Nvidia chip .... The search function of this forum will lead you to links of Lenovo provided DIY instructional videos.  This also presents a good opportunity to clean things up and use a BB size dab of Arctic Silver thermal paste to run cooler than the factory built units.  Use the search function for Mark_Lenovo's post with more instructions for this procedure (I think that same post also has the link to the How-To Lenovo videos).

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