I’ve already had a motherboard replaced this year, but that’s beside the point. I’m going to start logging my issues with the laptop now.

– At 8:40 am, on February 25, 2010, after successfully coming out of standby, and successfully logging in, both the main display and the external display shut off and [Fn][F7] was unable to reset display settings. Moreover, it did not respond to the docking station’s (eject) undock button. My only recourse was to hold the power button for 10 seconds.

I thought this article might help:
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/MIGR-67382.html
However, upon further review and confirmation by our helpdesk, this is not the docking station that can be fixed by the above resolution. Instead, we tried a different docking station.

That seemed to resolve the problem. No glitches for two weeks (plus an additional week where I was not docking my PC).

– At 8:20 am, on March 15, 2010
I docked that laptop while in stand-by mode. The standby indicator light on the laptop turned off and no power or battery lights were illuminated.

Pressing the power button had no effect.

I removed the laptop from its docking station and pressed the power button. There was still no response from the laptop.

Only after removing all power, removing and replacing the battery, and redocking did my laptop boot again. When it booted, the primary monitor was now the external and in a lower resolution mode than it normally boots to.

– At 8:55a on 5-26-2010
Main problems lately have had to do with sluggish performance. Tranferred some of my activities to a different machine to lighten the load. From boot, it takes 9 minutes before Outlook will respond.

I’m also tired of restoring my Active Desktop upon reboot, which Windows XP apparently can’t do due to a scripting error of some sort. Thanks, Microsoft for making Vista so uncomfortable for enterprises to upgrade to that many of us are stuck waiting on the Windows 7 rollouts.

Today, however, laptop also locked up after I locked the system. No response to mouse or keyboard.

– At 8:45 am on 5-28-2010

Lenovo T61 was at 800×600 viewport on 1400×900 res at 16-color depth when I powered on. Plugged in monitor, no video output at all.

Had to power down using power button. Tired of recovering documents because I happen to move my laptop.

– At 8:52 am on 6-01-2010

Extended life battery was used during a meeting Friday. Between that and standby mode all weekend the battery was down to 2%, requiring 3:35 hours to fully charge. I’m ordering a replacement battery, but I won’t be able to use this machine as a “laptop” for the next 2 hours, while I get enough charge to make it through a 1 hour meeting.

– June 11, 2010

• Got a brand new extended battery. Battery used 25% of its power in 30 minutes.

– June 12, 2010

• PC failed to hibernate, and so the battery went dead overnight.
• PC locked up about 10 minutes after boot.
• On reboot, “Windows cannot find ‘(null)’. Make sure you typed the name correctly, and then try again.

– July 11, 2010

• [Successfully] hibernated on Friday afternoon, while laptop was fully charged.
• Restarted from hibernate on Sunday night, the brand new, fully charged battery was down to 56%.