Strange Thinkpad behavior....overheating?

[LeftyAce]

Hi all,

I have a recently-acquired (but old) Thinkpad T42 purchased through IBM's certified refurbished program, and it's misbehaving.

More often than not, it won't resume from standby; I can hear the harddrive spin up, but it just sits there indeffinitely. Holding the power button and then resetting with the battery and AC adapter removed does not fix the issue; it must be left alone for around 10 minutes before it will turn on at all (won't give me the BIOS screen or anything).

Once or twice, the laptop has spontaneously gone into standby, and both times it would not come back out.

It goes into a coma on standby whether I'm on AC or battery power, and even when I'm running off AC with the battery removed (So I don't think it's just an old, hot battery problem).

I've tested the ram with memtest, and it's fine, so my next guess is temperature.... I loaded up speedfan, which sees 2 temperatures: "HD0" (Which is always between 28 and 35 C) and "Temp 1" which is sometimes as low as 29, but gets into the upper 40s and low 50s during periods of heavy use (such as running memtest)...not sure where that sensor is other than that speedfan calls it "ACPI Temperature".

This happens even if I try to standby immediately after starting up successfully (Although the temperature can be as high as 44 right after bootup).

So, my question is, does my diagnosis sound right? And if so, is there anything I can do about it, or should I bite the bullet and return it for a brand new model?

Thanks in advance, and sorry for the length of the post.

[glc]

I'd return it if it has a warranty.

[Lespaul20]

I agree, it's really not worth the hassle of trying to diagnose if you can just exchange or return.

BTW, it's not that old.

[LeftyAce]

Ok, thanks for the input. Just wanted to make sure there wasn't some simple fix.

It's not that old, but I figured it was relevant that I'm not dealing with a brand-new machine. (And yet I have no idea whether this is a new problem or if it's been happening for a while).

Off to figure out where to ship it back........

[LeftyAce]

Ok, with this in mind, I have a question regarding purchasing a new laptop......What is the current wisdom on Vista? Lenovo gives the option (for $80 extra) to get XP pro installed. Now, before this becomes simply a "Vista is/isn't better than XP " discussion (although comments along those lines would be welcome), how much RAM would I need in order to run Vista effectively? If I need to upgrade to 2GB of ram to run Vista, that costs the same as switching to XP, in which case I'll go with XP.

Thoughts?

[glc]

I don't think you would be happy with Vista with less than 2gb ram. XP is decent with 1gb unless you game or multitask heavily.

My nephew got a new Dell desktop with Vista and 1gb, it was a total turd. We wiped it and put XP on it and it is very noticeably more responsive.