wrote:
Srry for not replying so good at the other replies, I was at school. Anyways, I got your point now. I can agree with what your saying, but still this is a sulution; Heating the motherboard will make your computer work again, not for long but it will fix the problem for a while. Now, I didn't say the GPU chip will fully work, but If you need to review you computer asap then you should heat your motherboard. It is an common GPU error for NVIDIA, and no solution for it is found - so that means you can't review your computer unless you buy another GPU or unless you heat your motherboard. Realesing this kind of posts like I did, is not an negative thing, it helps people desperate enought to heat their motherboards and review their computer, for a short duration - some even forever, like my computer did.
Good luck with your motherboard. Most don't last more than a few days or weeks. I've heard of some members that got theirs to last for a few months, but they ended up with random BSOD crashes and repeatedly needing to reheat the chip. The thing that upsets me is that this method has been posted here dozens of times already and it usually results in people using this method to sell their defective laptop or motherboards.
The truth of the matter is when the gpu chip fails it has internal circuits that have cracked (fractured). A good analogy is when a lightbulb fails you can sometimes tap on it and if you can get the broken filiment to touch the bulb will light and it may continue to work for a few days or longer, as long as you don't bump it again, and eventually even if you are very careful the excess heat from the resistance where the broken ends are touching will cause excessive heat and will again burn out.
This might be helpful to get data off your computer, but in my opinion I'd think it was a waste of time to disassemble and rebuild my laptop to have it only work for a couple days. I guess if someone enjoys taking their laptop apart every week or so then there is no harm, but I'd prefer to fix it properly.
A proper fix would be a board from August 2008 or one with Intel graphics.
You cannot replace the GPU, they are soldered on the board and even if you had access to an infrared reballing station to resolder (reball) a gpu chip, finding a good one is virtually impossible. nVidia only makes replacement chips for OEM customers and only when required to do so by contract. They lose money whenever they make small quantities of chips, in order for them to be profitable they have to be produced in the millions. Also to further complicate things most GPU chips sold online are fake, usually old chips removed from scrap equipment that have had the numbers polished off the dies and new numbers etched on with a deceptive production date. . These fake chips have been coming out of china for decades and in many cases it wasn't a problem because it was a cheap source of chips, but with chips known to be bad it became a huge problem and this was compounded when 3rd party factories begain refurbishing boards with fake gpu chips. There were several of these factories making these boards in southeast asia, but thankfully most have closed down. Lenovo does sell refurbished boards but unfortunately most do not get new GPU chips installed on them and they are quite expensive, but the best option is a board that was originally manufactured with the updated GPU chip but they were only used for one month before the T61 series was replaced.
ps. You can try using an external GPU card in an 2503 advanced docking station so your nVidia card isn't used. The laptop still will probably fail, but this may prolong the failure. You can also try removing the nVidia drivers and run it as a standard VGA graphics card. All video cards support these drivers with no acceleration, it's built in so that you can get up and running in order to install the proper drivers, but if they are used instead it may prolong the failure at the cost of significant performance loss.
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.