Cyker

Slight tangent: My brother has also been having RAM issues, but we have discovered that it seems to be due to the Zalman heatsink! Have you heard of this before?! I stumbled over a single forum post while googling that mentioned loosening the heatsink screws by half a turn can fix RAM errors when using Zalman coolers with custom brackets on CPUs with integrated memory controllers... and it seems to have worked!

Well, I confess I didn't go as far as taking a dremel to the contacts

Yeah, that was the first thing I did; Didn't make any difference at all - Same errors in the same place, which was why I figured the RAM was bad. Also why I found it so utterly bizarre that it went away Anyway, we replaced both modules (RAM is so cheap these days!) just to be sure, but that's gotta be one for the books! Had a few possible theories; Most plausible one so far is that some moisture somewhere was causing the intermittent fault, and the 2 days of hammering evaporated it

Sure!

Summary: Bad RAM suddenly 'healed' after long memtest; Theories?! Okay, so a friend was complaining their laptop kept crashing; They'd be doing something then weird lines would appear on the screen, then crash. Classic bad RAM symptoms on systems that use integrated graphics. So to be sure, ran memtest and yup many errors. I think I had a phone call or something then as, for some reason, I went away and forgot about it. 2 days later I remember to check it - It's been running for near enough 2 days at this point and despite racking up 90,000 errors and many fails, I noticed with interest that it had 7 passes. WTF? So I power-cycle the machine and run memtest again - No errors!!! Waaaaaaaat?! Has this happened to anyone before? I had already done the usual stuff of cleaning the contacts with switch cleaner, reseating the modules etc. The only thing that currently springs to mind is if there were some tin whiskers or something on the BGA that were creating a teeny tiny short which have been fried by the RAM being hammered for 2 days straight. I am now not sure whether to bother replacing the RAM or not...! I've left it off to cool down for a while now just to see if it starts failing again, but this is pretty weird; Never seen this happen before! Edit: Fixed linefeeds...

Update for anyone who wanted some closure: It seems, unlikely as it may be, that the problem lies with this XP disc after all! We did a fresh install onto the spare HDD from an activation-less VLK disc and safemode works properly! Annoyingly performing a rebuild install on his existing disk didn't have the same effect, so it looks like he's got the long painful process of a full rebuild ahead of him if he wants it fixed... Props to jaclaz for the hind about the media; Didn't even occur to me the install media might be the cause!

Annoyingly but predictably, my X121e's F5521gw wouldn't work in the X230; Damned BIOS lock wouldn't even let the lappy boot (Why do they do this!?) However, was able to manually download an older driver from http://download.lenovo.com/ibmdl/pub/pc/pccbbs/mobiles/g1wo07ww.exe and that has at least stopped the WWAN from crashing when I access the Lenovo Wireless Connection Status or Access Connections' "Mobile Broadband Settings" tab. Everything still appears as Unknown or Unnamed Network but it works so I'll take it! Edit: Linefeeds! Omnomnom

Yeah, the text modes work okay, you can even see the Windows logo during boot up - It's just when it switches graphics mode for Safe Mode then BLAM "Out of Range" Really bizarre and totally nonsensical! If I hadn't seen it for myself I'd never have believed it! I have no idea how to fix it as we can't duplicate it in e.g. Linux, but we plugged in a new HDD and tried installing XP onto it and the same thing happened - After the first reboot where you have to start clicking Next a lot, the screen just goes into the Out of Range mode. Might try swapping PSU and RAM out, see if that makes any difference but the system is one of those tiny AIO systems that are a PITA to change things in. Since Safe Mode isn't a regularly used thing, I think he'll just have to put up with not using it or buy a new computer! Maybe XP initializes the video system in a weird way which is triggering some odd bug in the video chip caused by bit rot?!

Recently got my hands on a cheap Thinkpad X230 to replace my X121e - Very cool system and so much more powerful! However I'm having trouble with the WWAN module; Does anyone else here have one? The problem I'm having is this: The GPS and card appear fine until you put a SIM in. With the SIM inserted, you can connect, but instead of showing EE or T-Mobile it displays Unnamed Network. More annoyingly, if you open Access Connections or any kind of Status utility to check signal strength etc. the card stops working and actually disappears from Device Manager and Network Connections, where it keeps reappearing and disappearing until you close the offending utility, at which point it reappears and stays! Would you lean more towards driver/firmware issue (Both are latest) or some odd hardware fault? It's just weird that it doesn't recognize the cell network it's connected too, and very annoying that it dies when the signal status etc. is queried, yet is able to connect just fine if these things are avoided! I'm going to pull the WWAN module from my X121e and see if that works this evening, but I have a feeling the Thinkpad BIOS block may stop it working...

Hey all, Got a bizarre problem here; Got a friend who's running XP but they can't get into safe mode because the screen just displays "Out of Range" when you boot into it. Tried it on a few other LCD monitors, all have the same problem. Now, Out of Range usually means the refresh rate or resolution is too high for the monitor, which isn't hard since LCDs have a pitiful range compared to CRTs, but even so all LCDs should be able to handle safe mode's VGA! Anyway, dragged out an ancient 17" CTX CRT behemoth just to be thorough and lo and behold, the Safe Mode screen! But instantly you can see things are not right - First of all, Safe Mode is deffo NOT running in VGA - At a guess it looks like 1280x1024. Even more weird is that the big ol' CRT reports that it's running at 640x480@87Hz!!! This should not be possible in safe mode!! Did a Repair install, started off okay until the first reboot, then even Windows Setup was afflicted with the same problem. Don't want to do anything too drastic as the system works just fine in non-safe mode, but has anyone come across this before?! Any suggestions on fixes??