ATI Graphics Card Problem

Today, September 3rd 2006, the ATI Mobility Radeon graphics card finally gave up and I have no display.

There was a hint of problem a few months ago, when I connected the T41 to the TV set using S-video, while the display on the TV screen was OK, the display on the laptop LCD was fuzzy: it was shaking in the horizontal direction and it was very hard to follow the mouse pointer on the screen.

This time, however, it is even worse.

It started as the previous time: screen started to oscillate in the horizontal direction with everything still visible. But when I tried to move the cursor trying to close applications before reboot, I realized that the screen was not responding: nothing was moving on the screen even if I moved the mouse and tried to type on the keyboard. I was not sure if the system was still running, but I had to use the power button to shut it down.

Then I tried to boot the machine again, and the bad news came - there was nothing on the screen. The LCD was dead black, not in black color, but in sorry-there-is-no-video-signal black. I had no idea what state the OS was in, and had no choice but to reach for the power button again.

Called IBM ThinkPad support line, it is 10pm Pacific time and the center in Atlanta is still working. After maybe 5 minutes of waiting, a service rep answered and I was shocked to realize that my 2004 T41 is still in warranty (might have saved couple of hundred $$). They will send me a box in which I will mail the machine to their service center for diagnostics and repair. At this point, it does not seem as bad as I had expected considering this laptop is my main machine (the backup machine is a 5-year-old AMD 900MHz, mentioned in a previous post). Since it is more expensive than my car I am not (able to) going to replace it any time soon. Fortunately I just did a major overhaul on the old AMD box and backed up data onto that machine, there should not be serious data loss even if IBM decides that I need new harddrive which is unlikely to happen - I was told by the support rep to keep my harddrive when mailing the machine to IBM. Looks like they won't know I am running Fedora Core 4 along with the original XP. This should not be the cause of graphics card failure, because I have been running this dual-boot setup for over 2 years.