I switched it back on and it ran for a couple of minutes before doing the same thing; after that I got half an hour out of it, and after an hour's rest it stayed on for about 90 minutes before I put it to sleep and went to bed. But when I woke it up next morning it died again.
Am now wondering whether I can pick a broken one up off ebay and make a working one out of the pieces, but most people who advertise faulty laptops don't specify the nature of the fault so there's obviously quite a big gamble involved. What I really need is someone who's cracked their screen and written it off with the lower half intact (do we know anyone who's done that? <g>). I was a couple of quid off getting a working T22 for about £90 last night, but then if I do that I still have the broken one to contend with (although having a supply of working parts does mean that I might be able to isolate the fault). There's a T23 for sale with a non-working backlight (and also no RAM, and as luck wouldn't have it it takes a different kind from the T22 — PC133 vs PC100), and it appears the LCD panels are sufficiently similar that they could be switched over. There's also a batch of five working T22s up for grabs. Hmm, now could I get into the laptop refurbishing business? :-)
But I'm afraid I did also end up accidentally winning an auction for a new laptop…
I downloaded IBM's "PC doctor" yesterday (which comes in three self-extracting floppy-disk images that only self-extract on Windows). First time I ran it, the machine shut down half way through running the tests (from what I could tell, all the tests passed too). According to the hardware maintenance manual, if the PC doctor won't run or doesn't find the fault, I should remove:
- non-IBM devices [none],
- all external devices [none],
- battery,
- hard disk drive,
- DIMM,
- any Ultrabay device, and
- PC cards [none]
I ran the test for the fan and thermal sensors several times. They passed. I put the battery back in (but it didn't seem to want to test that, possibly because it hadn't been installed when it booted up and checked for installed devices). Then I ran all diagnostic tests, and they passed. Then I ran a five minute system load test, and it passed. I reinstalled the hard disk drive, switched memory sticks, rebooted and started tests again. They still passed, though half way through the (extremely long) memory test I decided to switch it off and go to bed as it was quite late.
Apparently, while I was in bed it spontaneously decided to switch itself on at 01:36, booted up and ran for a bit over an hour before detecting a low battery and successfully entering sleep mode.
I woke it up this morning and within ten minutes it was dead again. Since then it's got progressively worse and won't even boot now. :-(
Meanwhile, I couldn't use my Solaris machine this morning as the computing manager is switching all the NFS servers around. I have a Linux machine which unaccountably seems to go completely dead if I use the keyboard too much, and even my mobile phone joined in by switching itself off at some time after I plugged it into the charger.
