Using this guide you’ll be able to replace or upgrade memory modules (aka RAM) in IBM ThinkPad T40, T40p, T41, T41p, T42, T42p series laptops. In my case I’ll be working with a ThinkPad T41.
This laptop came with 512MB RAM installed. There are two 256MB memory modules installed. One of them can be easily accessed from the bottom of the laptop. The second module is hidden under the keyboard.
In this guide I explain how to remove and replace the keyboard on an IBM ThinkPad T30 laptop. This guide should work for many other IBM ThinkPad laptops because they all have similar cases.
You can easily remove and replace the keyboard at home without taking your laptop to a repair shop.
First of all, turn off the laptop, unplug the power adapter and remove the battery.
Here are instructions for replacing screen inverter in IBM ThinkPad T40, T40p, T41, T41p, T42, T42p series laptops. All these models are identical and share the same disassembly steps.
What is the screen inverter in a laptop computer? Why would you want to replace the inverter?
The screen inverter is a small circuit board witch is located inside the laptop display panel, you’ll find it below the LCD screen. The screen inverter provides high voltage AC power for the backlight bulb (CCFL) and because of that the image on the screen is bright. If the inverter board fails, the LCD screen remains dark after the laptop is turned on and the image on the screen is very dark, almost invisible. You still should see the image on the screen under a bright light but without backlight the laptop is unusable.
Let’s say you have an IBM ThinkPad laptop and when you turn it on all you get is a black screen with “Fan error” message. What could be wrong?
A few weeks ago, the fan in my trusty IBM T42 bought the farm. This resulted in the unit heating up considerably, as well as numerous “fan error” messages on bootup. It eventually became so bad that to boot up at all, I had to blow compressed air into the fan’s exhaust grill for 5-10 seconds, in order to fool the BIOS and make it believe the fan was actually spinning.
According to the IBM hardware maintenance guide (HMM) for ThinkPad T40, T40p, T41, T41p, T42, T42p this error message indicates a problem with the fan, you can find symptom-to-FRU index on the page58.
The symptom-to-FRU index in this section lists symptoms and errors and their possible causes.
Apparently it’s time to replace the fan assembly. The cooling fan comes together with the heat sink, that’s why you’ll have to replace the whole fan assembly.
Do you have an IBM ThinkPad laptop with a missing key on the keyboard? Not a problem, you can fix the keyboard without taking your laptop to a repair shop. It’s not even necessary to disassemble the laptop and replace the whole keyboard. If you have all the pieces from the fallen key, then the repair process shouldn’t take a lot of time. These instructions will explain how to assemble the key and install it back on the keyboard.
Is it possible to make an older IBM ThinkPad T41p laptop a little bit faster? Yes, it is if you upgrade the CPU as it explained in this tutorial
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I learned that with a simple BIOS flash, the original 1.7 ghz pentium M “Banias” CPU (130nm process, 1mb L2 cache) that came standard with the T41p can be upgraded to a 2.0 GHz Pentium M 755 “Dothan” CPU (90nm process, 2mb L2 cache) which was available in the later T42 models.
Do you have an older IBM ThinkPad laptop that came without internal wireless card and wireless antennas but has a slot for the wireless card on the bottom? Now you can upgrade your laptop by installing internal wireless card and antennas yourself using these instructions. UPDATE: the link has been removed because it’s dead. For the laptop disassembly you can use instructions in the service manual. You’ll find the link at the end of this post.
In this project we added an internal wireless adapter to a Thinkpad a31. This is possible since it shares the chassis of the Thinkpad A31p which included internal wireless and bluetooth, at the time, cost about $1000 more.
This guide was made for an IBM ThinkPad A31 laptop but should work for some other ThinkPads too.
First of all make sure your laptop has a slot for the wireless card, otherwise installing antennas is absolutely pointless. Usually you can access this slot from the bottom of the laptop. The wireless card slot looks similar to a memory slot.
this projects uses one:
- Dell Truemobile miniPCI 1400
- IBM replacement a31 antenna system
Your IBM ThinkPad laptop screen (or any other laptop) went blank? Check out this article.
I could get the screen to come back on momentarily by toggling Fn-F7 a few times, but after about 10 seconds it went blank again. After rebooting, same thing — 10 seconds and blank.
Upon closer inspection, I noticed that I could actually see the windows very, very dimly on the screen. However, it was so faint I couldn’t see a cursor or read any text but the screen was definitely trying to project the image. So I hooked up an external monitor and the image displayed just fine.
The author of the above mentioned article article tried replacing the screen inverter board first but it didn’t help. After that he replaced the LCD screen and this resolved the problem.
From myself I would like to add a few more tips for troubleshooing and resolving laptop backlight problems.
Read the rest of this entry »
This guide will show how to open up the LCD screen on an IBM laptop and replace the failed backlight lamp (CCFL).
LCD panels become useless when their backlight lamps fail. It can fail as early as one year after production, but most units fail after three or four years of use. My ThinkPad T23 is a little more than three years old and its backlight started to show pinkish tone. Moreover it was flickering when first turned on. The symptoms usually disappeared after several minutes, but it became really annoying. So I decided that it is time to replace the backlight.
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