Weird Thinkpad Display Issues
TNT delivered my Thinkpad T30 back today. A quick check showed that it was a new motherboard and it has the latest BIOS and embedded controller software, which means that it’s one of the newer boards without the memory slot problems. My excitement didn’t last long because soon after I booted into Linux the screen went magenta and fuzzy. My first guess was they must have changed the video chipset and I would just need to replace the driver, but when I shutdown the machine the problem remained after X quit, and even more worryingly it was still there when I restarted went into the BIOS.
When I booted the machine up later the problem was gone, but after a while it came back, but then went away again. An intermittent problem with no apparent cause. A search on Google didn’t turn up much, the closest was ‘Problem with garbled screen‘ on Thinkwiki. But the screenshots don’t look like the same problem, maybe there are different levels of severity.
I took some photos of the problem. First one is of the BIOS screen, it’s hard to see the problem because it only really shows up on white areas of the screen and the photo looks a lot better than what is actually displayed. I’ve circled a couple of areas where you can see the problem:
Once you’re into Linux the problem is very obvious as you can see here:
I guess it’s back on the phone to IBM technical support tomorrow morning, sigh.
