So, I recently picked up an old Lenovo T500 from my friend. He said that all it needed was a new screen and charger, and it would be good to go.
Apparently not.
I’ve been fighting with it for the last few hours to actually get it to stay online. It will stay on in the BIOS (i’ve had it run for at least 5 minutes and it’s not tried to power off) but as soon as I try to load any kind of OS, it flat out turns off. Click from the HDD as the heads go back, and all power is lost. It won’t even let me turn it on after this, the only way to get it to boot again is to remove ALL power from the system and plug it back in again.
I’ve tried redoing the thermal paste, tried it with and without the battery in, tried booting my multi-OS HDD via USB and internally, taken the DVD drive out, removed all screws that could possibly short out the board, swapped RAM, no change. It DID boot when I plugged it in for the first time (and the shutdown times seemed insane, was instant on Lubuntu and I mean instant, hit “shutdown” and boom, gone) but it just won’t stay on now.
That's what I'm fearing. I just managed to get it midway through a Windows install but it cut out again. Reset and turned it back on again and it asked for a HDD password (which I never set) but accepted a blank pass. Got stuck, so I reset again and tried to boot in. Windows obviously complained but then the system started to make weird EMI sounds (like the ones you get when your phone's too close to speakers) and a couple of odd, quiet squealing sounds. :S
Assuming the battery holds a charge and it doesn't boot from that, then it's probably not the power supply, and there's probably an issue with the power delivery on it.
The T500 almost exclusively requires the 90W adapter. If you have the 65W adapter it could be maxing out as the load increases and causing it to cut off. If you do have a 90W adapter and it's still causing the shutoff, leave the laptop plugged in and charging for about an hour then come back to it and attempt the install. You may get through it with the charge on the battery keeping the machine from tripping the adapter.
No matter what you do from this point on, budget for a new adapter. Should be about $20 for a real Lenovo 90W, and maybe more like $12 for a knock-off.
Also that generation of ThinkPad has very bad coil whine, don't be too alarmed by that.
I left it charging all day while I was at school. Came home, unplugged it from power (so it'd run off the battery), turned it on, booted into Windows setup, and it died on the first reboot at the same point it did last time. The squealing noises are getting louder and it sounds like something's having a fit down near the RAM. The screen arrived too, so I shoved that in but it doesn't even POST before turning off. One thing I have noticed is that none of the onboard LEDs work, on either the old or new inverter board.
I've asked my friend what charger he was using at the time, so I await his response. Doesn't look good though :(
Try to run the notebook without the battery and keep connected to it just the basic stuff like one stick of RAM, the HDD and nothing else. Disconnect even the DVD burner, Wi-Fi card the webcam and keep connected just the bare minimun. The point of this is try to put as low strain as possible on the power delivery system in the notebook and see if drawing as low power as possible makes any difference. Also, if you can, take out the entire board and inspect all the capacitors on it with a magnifing glass to see if anything looks weird.
Just tried that now. Removed the WiFi card, monitor and backlight assembly, one RAM stick, the SSD, and DVD drive. Just had the CPU, one RAM stick, a monitor and my bootable HDD (which uses about half an amp or so). Booted it up, tried to get into the boot menu but it gave me a double beep and said "Press to Setup". Saved and exited, tried again and loaded Linux Mint. Same issue as before, stops in exactly the same place (just after the automatic boot screen). I'll have a look at the board once I work out how to get the bottom off :p
I will note, just before the system turned off, it made a fairly loud EMI-sounding noise again. :S
Did you try to install a new CMOS battery? My old old old Toshiba Satellite with Windows 95 started to freak out when the CMOS battery died (not the way your notebook is). Give it a shot.
Okay, pulled my HP apart to find the battery wasn't connected the same way as my ThinkPad! :( Fashioned a replacement and redone the time and date. I think I may have found the fault though - it's the USB ports. I plugged in my HDD, and sometimes it would power the drive up and sometimes it wouldn't, and I must've moved it a bad way as it caused the machine to power off. I'll have a closer look in a sec, but I'm going to try loading up a boot CD instead of using my HDD to see what that does.
EDIT: I've also gone back to the original RAM stick it had. The two I installed are known working but faster, so not sure if that was causing any issues.
EDIT 2: Well, after waiting all that time for Windows to install from DVD, it cut out once again. It again made some weird sounds by the RAM slots and then gave up. Not sure where to go from here...
Alright, I hate to double post but I thought I'd just update once more.
Decided to breadboard the system after taking a quick look at the board. Nothing seemed to be out of the ordinary - everything looked OK. Plugged in my SSD, ODD, KB and power, and started it up. BIOS reset again (which means my bodged battery thing didn't work) but I fixed that and started up my Win7 DVD again. Did the first reboot, made the same strange noises, and turned off completely.
I'm pretty certain that there's no way to fix this problem. It's as if when Windows (or a Linux OS) tries to initialise the GPU, it just flat out craps itself and turns off. I noticed there's a lot of paste stuck under the black plastic cover on top of the GPU but I doubt that would be doing anything bad.
Would you say the system's dead? If so, luckily the eBay sellers I bought the charger and screen off of accept returns :p
seems like u already invested alot of time into it, and dont wish to continue, but your laptop has a short somewhere on the mainboard. Basically as soon as a section (trace) of your laptop gets a load it cuts off. I had that happen to a laptop of mine in which i guess the CMOS battery caused some form of acidic corrosion. The best way to clean PCB is to completely submerge into alcohol (91%) and srub with a tootubrush (gently, mind you) but that includes complete removal of the motherboard and the cmos battery.
This is very time-consuming and not a gauranteed fix. u really have to believe lol
Yeah, I've been at this for at least 5 hours now over the course of a couple of days. I had planned to make this my main laptop to replace my other HP one as while it's a good machine, it's extremely bulky and heavy whereas this T500 wasn't. I looked at the board a bit more and couldn't really find anything, so I might just swallow and send everything back. It's a real shame, but you can't win at everything I guess. I don't have 91% alcohol to hand, and by the time I do and try to clean the thing, the return time will expire by then.
Time to save up and get something that actually works, I guess. :S
