Hi,

So I had a old IBM ThinkPad 600X given to me, and to my dismay the charger socket seems to be broken. It shorts out when I plug something in (as in a little spark when the charger is plugged in). Not to worry I thought, I plugged a 12v charger straight onto the battery terminals and it works! I can boot to DSL, install it to the HDD and it works fine. It sat there last night happily while I watched TV for a few hours.

However, any other Linux distro won't work. Or even Windows for that matter. It gets as if it's almost loaded then the laptop suddenly cuts out. I think this could be to do with the kernel loading Power Management stuff, then realizing "OMG where's the battery!?" and cutting out because it thinks its totally flat.

Anyone else heard of anything like this? Particularly laptop pro Sas, you fixed anything like this, how did you do it?

Thanks a lot.

(this will be cross-posted into O/S forum)

Crossposting deleted as it gets on my wick

Check the HDD for bad sectors.
DSL is less than 50MB so might not reach those sectors.
I'd also try running the system from a live bartPE or Linux CD and run a disk check from in there.
I'd also check the cdrom drive as I've had similar issues with dodgy cd drives.
Windows shouldn't care if there's a battery or not.

I've tried a few HDDs in here and it seems to be the same problem. :/

At what point does an install fail?

No,no.

The install works fine, it's just when I boot into windows, it will last about 15 minutes before suddenly turning off. And in Linux it will boot Damn Small Linux fine, and I have this installed. But any other distro crashes and powers the laptop off as soon as it tries to load (what I think is) power management.

It's not overheating either, the fan is on and it's never really hot.

You can turn off power management in XP. Could it be a dodgy lid sensor?

Did you solder the connections or just clip them on.

They're attached to the terminals using those flat spade crimps. I've unplugged the lid sensor and its made no difference.

Trying Win98 now, just out of fluke it might work because it's a "stupid" OS and doesn't care what it runs on

Ok, so I'm on the laptop now under Win98SE, and it lasts about half an hour or so before cutting out. This is weird, because it worked fine on DSL for about three hours last night and it didn't cut out at all. The only time it did was when I shut it down.

I want to use another OS though because DSL doesn't support WPA wireless, which I need the laptop to do so I can use it for the web here. Even the Puppy works with it, but that turns off before its even loaded the GUI. :/

Ah well, I wonder if I can put voltage to the two battery terminals to make it think something is there. I dunno.

I suspect DSL isn't working it hard or using all the chipset in some way. I strongly suspect one of the chips is over heating, and maybe not one you can tell just by touching the case.

If you can, strip it down and run it naked. Then poke it until it burns.

Done. I was running F@H on the DSL installation and it seemed to be OK. I can even play GTA3 in Windows, and it works perfectly until the inevitable shutdown. But what I don't understand is that XP only lasts like 10 minutes, Win2k won't boot and Windows 98 is OK for a half hour/three quarts. :/

I think it is something to do with power management. I'll maybe strip it down tomorrow and have a proper look at the charging area on the PCB.

Thanks all

In that case, memory. Any chance of swapping it out to test?

I ran '98 perfectly fine on memory that wouldn't even boot 2K. Memory faults are pretty random; if the faulty cell isn't hit then it doesn't crash. DSL uses the least memory so it's the least likely to crash.

Annoyingly, memory tests are not that useful. Most of them refresh the memory too often for leakage faults to be detected; dynamic ram only holds data for a very short time unless it's refreshed. Still, worth running a couple just to see.

I'll check that tomorrow.

Thinkpads have 64mb onboard, so if that's whats up I guess the whole shebang is bin-worthy.

EDIT: Thats all I'm using too. I have some 64mb laptop SDRAM chips somewhere, but I cannot find them for the life of me.

Also, when I first got this laptop it had a battery. All I did was splice the two wires from the charger onto the battery terminals and it worked for ages before the battery packed up and wouldn't let me boot with it in any more.

I guess maybe it's voltage then. What are you using as a power source exactly? If it's the charger, then it'll be putting out way too much voltage compared to the battery. That's not going to be good for, well, anything. Random memory faults, overheating regulators and eventually total death.

Can you solder the power con back in place? I don't know the internal power circuit of this laptop, but it's more likely to run happy if the power is in the right place. It should be properly regulated then. That said, a lot of old laptops wouldn't work if the battery was totally dead even with the power plugged in...

I really don't think it's power management per say. I think the lighter installs work better because they're less stressful.

I'm using a 2.5amp 12v power supply that I nicked from a external HDD jobbie, as the battery itself worked at 2 amps@11.8v. It worked last time though with a 18v proper ThinkPad supply on the terminals, so I guess it self-regulates the voltage from the battery. But it was exactly the same.

It's not the power connector whats broken. It's still in place. But whenever I try and plug anything into it. it's as if something is shorted inside and it shorts out the charger. But when I stripped it down I couldn't see anything obvious. If I feel up to it tomorrow, I'll have a proper look at the mobo and see if any resistors/fuses etc are blown. You can physically see sparks coming from the barrel when you push the power plug into the connector. Just goes to show ThinkPads are unkillable

Having said that, I dunno wether it's worth the effort for a 500mhz Pentium 3 laptop with 64mb RAM and NeoMagic graphics.

It will to a certain extent, since most of the board runs from 5 or 3 or less volts. However, the regulators are not designed to take anything other than the rated battery so they may well shut down after a period of time. Have you measured the voltage coming from the 12V PSU? It may well be not what you expect. Ideally, put a 'scope on it and look for spikes.


That rather depends on how much time you have to kill

The 64MB is the killer. Even web browsing needs more than that these days to be any fun; my Firefox is using 180MB right now and I only have 15 tabs open. Your processor is probably not that much slower than the VIA in my netbook, but that has 2GB ram.