yesterday i spent a few hours taking apart and working on a broken ThinkPad T23. i checked all connections, applied Arctic Silver to the CPU, replaced an inverter board under the screen, soldered an inductor to the motherboard, added additional padding under the motherboard, and then super-glued a busted part of the case. all that allowed the system to boot up and work fine after having been off (and unable to even power on) for almost a full year. i'm actually quite proud of myself for getting my T23 working again.
my T23 has these specs:
Pentium III 1.13 GHz
512 Megs RAM
8x DVD rom
30 Gig HD
built in WiFi
so, its a pretty nice system. i was heart broken when it stopped working last year after i had put so much time and money into fixing it up.
i have a stack of ThinkPads (about 6), and have spent a LOT of time looking at hardware maintenance manuals and researching them online.
NONE of the systems worked when i got them. i purchased about $400 in parts off eBay to get them all working. things like memory chips, optical drives, floppy drives, LCD screens, batteries, AC adapters, keyboards, palm rest/bezels, etc.
most came from a company that had tossed them. many were out dated (three are Pentium 1 systems), and one was very damaged. the T23 had been dropped, so its bezel/case was cracked and the screen would flicker. the keyboard had some chemical damage, and many keys were melted and unreadable.
when i got the T23, i purchased ram, DVD drive, new keyboard, and a new bezel for it. i also re-soldered the inverter board on it to fix the flicker. after all that, the system worked *great* ... until one day it died.
it would power on, but then it would just sit, and never post. the fan on it would kinda pulse, fast then slow, over and over.
i did some Google searches, and found it was an issue with other T23 systems, and i read that it could be fixed by soldering a loose part back on the motherboard. after taking apart the system, i couldn't locate the broken part. so the laptop just sat.
recently, after coming across another ThinkPad that i have been fixing up, i found a web site called thinkpads.com. on the forum on that site, i found more info regarding non booting T23s, including better pictures of the problem part - and i also read that the problem piece was on the *bottom* of the motherboard (where i did not look). so when i took apart my T23 last night, i removed the motherboard completely, checked under it, and actually found the exact broken part shown in the pictures.
the thread that helped me is here:
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=27245