Fixing an IBM T42 Thinkpad with No Video (In Ohio)

I picked up this IBM T42 Thinkpad on 15 Nov 2011 after work at Brentwood Mall. It was described as "a dead IBM T42 laptop that doesn't boot up. Great for repair or parts". The person sold it to me said that it was a company laptop that his boss wanted to get rid of it.

When I returned home, I checked this T42. Its condition was very new. All parts were inside, including the 40 GB hard drive. I pressed the power button. Lights came up but no video. I changed the motherboard. It booted up successfully. The desktop screen showed a company logo. It had MS Office installed. For data privacy, I reformatted the hard drive to clear it up.

Since this T42 was in good condition, I put in additional 512GB RAM to make it 1GB RAM. The 40GB Hard Drive was changed to another 60GB hard drive which has no bad sectors.

I restored the PRELOAD partition from CD to the hard drive and restore this T42 to factory contents. The video, wireless, sound, CD drive and USB ports were tested. No problems were identified.

After charging the battery, the power meter said 3 hours. In actual usage, the battery drop to 50% after an hour. The battery should last for 2 hours.

This T42 is in pristine condition. With 1GB RAM and 60 GB hard drive, it went to Ohio on 18Dec2011 to serve again. Unfortunately, the new owner Ron told me that it had video problem upon arrival.

Ron entered a comments to this HUB page on 29Mar2013 asking if I can fix it. It was my honour to repair. I got it back on 2Apr2013. I took a day off at home to wait for the package. It arrived at 2:00 pm. I started up the T42 several times and ran for a while before the video problem came up. I swapped a new motherboard from another Thinkpad which I ended the selling knowing that Ron wanted to ship the T42 back for repairing.

With a new motherboard, the T42 is working well again. However, the hard drive was not the one that I sent out. There were drivers not installed (see photos). I contacted Ron who wanted me to install the missing drivers but not reinstalling the XP. I had not done this before. For missing Multimedia Audio Controller driver, it was fixed by installing the audio driver which was downloaded from IBM website. However, there is not IBM Thinkpad Fast Infrared Port driver. It was fixed by uninstalling the device and restart the system. The PCI modem was the most time consuming one. Although IBM website has modem drivers but none of them applied. The IBM XP inside the hard drive did not go to internet to find and download driver. I used another hard drive which had the option to find driver from internet and found that the modem is "Agere system AC'97 modem". I found the driver from IBM web site which is named "AMR Modem driver (CDC)" . The file name is 10ma23ww.exe. As requested by Ron, I placed all the drivers that I found to c:\spare, including the modem folder file name SWMDMLUC.

The T42 was shipped back on 4April2013 which would take 4 to 8 business days to travel back.