From: "Edgar" <ecs-t6x@2rosenthals.com>
Message-ID: <4CEB436C.10707@allisonstravel.on.ca>
Date: Mon, 22 Nov 2010 23:30:36 -0500
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To: eCS ThinkPad T60/61 Mailing List <ecs-t6x@2rosenthals.com>
Subject: Re: [eCS T60/T61] T61 Nvidia Quadro heat issue: how I fixed it
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Sender:  Edgar <edgar.scrutton@allisonstravel.on.ca>

Lewis et  al:
    The gentleman who's business is next door to Allison's Travel has 
developed a solid reputation for the repair of laptops.  I can recommend 
his services to all T6# users.  He has done resoldering and eve created 
a 'setup for heading individual chips on a MoBo.  He tell me he is 
familiar with this problem. Here is a link to his site:
http://sentrex.ca/index.html
Edgar.

Lewis G Rosenthal wrote:
> Greetings, all, and in case we don't chat again in the interim, Happy 
> Thanksgiving (and belated Happy Thanksgiving to our Canadian friends)...
>
> Several of you are aware of the issues I've had with my wife's T61 
> recently, specifically, the failure of her video about one month out 
> of the 3-year factory warranty (nice).
>
> This is a known issue on T61's (and other notebooks with the Nvidia 
> Quadro GPU), as apparently over time, the constant heat up/cool down 
> leads to some minute cold solder joints on the GPU connection to the 
> system board. While I'd read about this problem (after the fact), I 
> was pretty much convinced that I had five options:
>
>   1. Purchase a new system board from IBM/Lenovo, and my channel price
>      on the part is about $600 (this is a higher end T61 - how lovely);
>   2. Attempt to purchase post-warranty coverage (I believe this is
>      called "Service Plus" or some such), for about $150-$200/yr,
>      hoping that that would cover this repair;
>   3. Pay IBM/Lenovo for the repair outside of warranty (ouch!);
>   4. Find a used T61 of the same model on eBay, and perhaps swap parts
>      back and forth to make a single "working" machine (of course,
>      *all* T61's with this chip are getting to be about this vintage,
>      so finding one *without* this issue - unless previously addressed
>      - is nigh on impossible); or
>   5. Junking the unit.
>
> I spied another thread in the Lenovo forums on this 
> (http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T61-and-prior-T-series-ThinkPad/T61-Nvidia-Quadro-NVS-140M-garbled-display-problem/td-p/46469) 
> just this morning, and set off to fix it myself, by baking the system 
> board in my toaster oven for 7 minutes at 385Ôäë (no kidding!) to get 
> the solder to reflow. Read my blog post on my experience, here: 
> http://www.2rosenthals.net/wordpress/?p=127/ . Suffice it to say, that 
> while this was indeed the wackiest repair I've ever attempted, I'm 
> pleased with the results. The machine is working like nothing ever 
> happened, and the best part is that Diane is pleased as punch. :-)
>
> Cheers/2
>