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