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: