Jun
18
I recently purchased an IBM Thinkpad T41 from a shady man…but for a great price. I paid $75 for this beast of a system. At first, it seemed to have everything and it actually powered on….How wrong was I. The system lacks a hard drive at the moment. Once I was able to power it on it beeped like mad. After some research I found out that long beep followed by 2 short beeps means to check the System Board, DIMM, and LCD assembly, in that order. I took the memory out and tested it in my trusty T30. The memory works. I’m hoping the System Board is ok, since i have no way of testing that. Finally I called IBM support and they told me that the LCD inverter may need to be replaced. I used a tutorial from Laptop Repair 101on how to disassemble the LCD.
As it currently stands, I ordered an LCD inverter from Ebay. I am hoping that this would fix it as I can not wait to use this sweet computer.
If everything works out, this could be a wonderful system for about $100-130.
I will keep you posted on the progress of the system update / work status.
Edit:
Here are some pictures of the LCD taken apart:
2 Responses to “Thinkpad T41 Repair Project”
Here’s how you can test the laptop without the inverter board. Unplug the video cable from the motherboard, then connect an external monitor to the VGA port on your laptop and turn on the laptop.
If you still hear the same error (1 long and 2 short) and there is no video on the external monitor, your problem could be related to the motherboard.
From my experience I can tell that an IBM laptop will not beep because of bad inverter board. It will boot with and the screen will be very dark, but it will not give you a beep error.
By Laptop Repair Tech on Jun 18, 2008
The thing is it sometimes beeps and sometimes starts up fine. When it starts up fine, there is a picture on the screen and after a short while it goes black. Hence why I thought it could be the inverter board.
By admin on Jun 19, 2008