wrote:
Hey all,
I had a friend that had this same issue a year ago, build date 08/08. He received his T61p at the same time I got mine.
Today I went to power on my T61p, which had been asleep. I pressed the power button and it sat there and nothing came on screen. I decided to reboot by using the power button. When I tried to do this, I got a blank screen and, you guessed it, 1 long beep followed by 2 short beeps.
I tried reseating the RAM, all combinations of both modules, and I tried hooking up an external monitor. None of that worked.
I think I'm just going to declare it dead. It gave me 5 years and 10 months of good service, used throughout college and after (although one of those years it was scarcely used). The original battery was dead after 3 years.
I just came here to post because it seems people think that a build date of August 2008 means that this issue won't happen to you, but I have just presented two cases, and I bet if I surveyed my college class (~1200 and everyone got the same one and probably a similar build date) I'd find that many people had the same issue with the same build date. But none of that matters, most are probably not in use today. A lot of people actually just killed their laptops for a warranty replacement before graduation.
Anyone have a recommendation for a replacement?
I was hoping to make it to Broadwell release...
Hi,
I can tell you that after spending years researching this that I can count the verified 08/08 failures on my fingers where the 2007 failures that I've personally seen are well into the tripple digits. Many of the 08/08 laptops that have failed have had the board swapped, usually for a non gpu warranty repair, but even a well made gpu can fail and a laptop used in a college is about the harshest environment for one of these laptop. Regardless of how well you care for it if you're starting and stopping the laptop for each class that is a lot of heat cycles which is the primary cause of stress in these chips.
You are correct that an 08/08 can fail, but they don't have the same abnormal rate of failure that the older models have and the fact that yours survived nearly six years of mostly college use, it would probably be deemed an acceptable lifespan, although I'm still no fan of nvidia's durability. They seem to know how to make a gpu perform, but could take some lessons from Intel who's gpu chips virtually never fail.
If you want to replace the laptop my recommendation would vary depending on if you can stand the newer designs with no track poing, chicklett keys that offer no physical feedback when typing and some have even done away with the mouse buttons. The 16:9 aspect ratio is also annoying if you're using web pages that need to scroll or documents. They are great for video, just not for real work. If you can tolerate this new trend then check out the W540, or if you want to keep your T61p and aren't planning on using it for 3D gaming often you might consider an Intel board. You could easily get another 5-10 years of use out of one of these and the Intel gpu is actually ideally suited for a classroom environment where you run on battery and need to turn on/off often.
ThinkPad W-510 i7-820QM(1.73-3.06GHz) Quad Core... ThinkPad T500, T9900, 8gb SSD...FrankNpad T-60p/61p (X9000 2.8ghz) 8gb SSD ips FlexView...ThinkPad T-61p (T9300 2.5ghz) 8gb ram...Thinkpad X-61 Tablet 8gb ram.