I’ve had a Lenovo Thinkpad out in the garage for about 5 years as the interface to my laser cutter. I went out there yesterday in the cold to make some cuts and it wouldn’t turn on. I’ve tried removing the battery, the spare battery, looking for the reset pin hole (couldn’t find it), and now I’m out of ideas.
Can you help me revive this thing? I’m afraid newer machines won’t run the ancient laser software. Yes, I can bring it to VHS after the snow melts.
By no start. No lights? Or lights but no turn on? Beeps? Try taking out ram and starting and see if it beeps?
Have you tried meowing at it till a human fixes it?
If you don’t get voltage. Unplug it. Wait 1 min. Plug back in. Measure voltage. If voltage alive. Plug in. And check if there’s still voltage after being plugged in.
That basically checks laptop to see if it shorts out the power brick. Or the brick itself is dead. But they don’t fail that often. Also what model Thinkpad?
Assuming the computer uses an external power supply, do you have another power supply to try? Maybe the failure is simply caused by a mechanical problem with the connector on the computer for the external power supply, like what happened earlier this year with the ThinkPad T540p of my father and what happened maybe already around a decade ago with my (IBM, not Lenovo) ThinkPad 755CD. Does the computer have a light that normally comes on when the power supply is connected even while the computer is off/in standby, like the +5Vsb (+5V Standby) LED on some stationary motherboards? I disagree that external power supplies for notebook computers do not fail often based upon my personal experience. I do not know which model of ThinkPad you have but if it is from Lenovo instead of IBM then I think that means it must be from 2005 or later if I recall correctly. You could try to find the service manual that covers your model to see what it says to do for your failure mode. Companies such as IBM and Lenovo seem to have basically the opposite philosophy than companies such as Apple in wanting to help their customers help themselves regardless of how far the customer is from the nearest dealer so you can probably solve or work around the problem by yourself.