This evening, I was happily inter-dorking on the stinkpad when the screen suddenly flickered, and the computer crashed.
That's pretty universally regarded as a Bad Thing™.
After some rebooting and wiggling, it was obvious that the newfound crash was related to wiggling hardware.
I took the keyboard off, and discovered that i could temporarily cure the problem by pushing hard on the graphics controller. Tapping the graphics controller, in turn, caused failure. I tried wedging some post-it notes under the keyboard to keep it from moving, but the pressure isn't enough. I'll have to add more.
Some googling reveals that graphics chip failures charactarized by screen flickers and crashes are common among T40/T41/T42 Thinkpads with Radeon 9600 and 7500 graphics.
Well, damn.
My brother had an iBook that suffered the same fate.
I wonder if this is related to my switch to ubuntu. I use hardware composting, which keeps the GPU busy and warm (and the windows moving smoothly). Maybe being heat baked for 3 months did it in?
A more likely explanation involves 5 years of hard loving in graduate school.
I don't know if it is worth it. But if you want to mail just the board to me I could probably give it a reflow. Or if you are feeling vindictive you could take a heat gun to it - that has been known to work as a poor mans reflow. Should you do that I do suggest squirting some flux under the chip first.
ReplyDeleteAny idea if it is lead free or not? That does effect the temperature at which we reflow...