Hi group.

This one is making me hum the "X Files" theme...

I did some routine tests on an IBM Thinkpad TP600, and on the next
reboot it failed with a blue screen. Figuring that something in Windows
had broken I restarted in Safe Mode and this worked fine.

Determining that the battery light flashing continuously and the
machine not running at all from battery power was probably not normal,
I removed it.

Interestingly, the laptop runs fine (windows came up with "recovered
from serious error") with the battery out. I've done some tests on the
battery and it appears to be shorted (0.0V on the terminals, probably
been in storage too long)

Has anyone else ever seen this symptom?

Regards,
-A

email

add an e to the instrument to email

I bought a used 600E from a local computer store. When I brought it
home, it wouldn't boot up. I called the store back and as he had me go
into the BIOS and check a couple of things, it eventually booted up.
This was on the beginning of a holiday weekend. Well, I noticed the
flashing amber light and wondered what it meant, so I went to IBM's
site and downloaded the Hardware Maintenance Manual, to discover this
was the battery light. I then went into the BIOS and ran system
diagnostics. It was showing a problem with the system board. But if I
took the battery out, system diagnostics showed no problem. I came to
find out that the laptop booted fine without the battery, but would
only sometimes boot with the battery installed. BTW, this laptop had
W2K.

After the holiday I brought the laptop back to the store to get a
replacement battery. When they installed the replacement from a second
600E, it fried that battery (at least that is what they told me).
Since they had a second 600E for sale, they swapped out the laptops,
and they went and gave me a battery for it a few days later. This 600E
still works great now.

So my advice is not to put the defective battery in the laptop, and
hope that the charging circuit on your laptop was not damaged.

Thanks

Its been there for a while, how long are we talking? this is useful as
a new battery is over £70 and he will be upset if it does not fix the
problem..

It also has the flashing amber light problem.

I speculate that the battery has an "intelligent" chip which only
allows charging when it has talked to the mainboard, so if it is
drawing excess power then it explains a lot (dragging down the 5v and
12v rails and causing glitches)

-A