Why is my Thinkpad screen flickering so much?
Oh, wow. I’ve been a computer guy for a long time and I’ve never seen that before (on and LCD). It’s very possibly a broken cable — they get flexed constantly, obviously. But they’re also designed for robustness and you rarely see one fail unless there’s been some kind of abuse (dropped ‘top, etc.). If you are an experienced computer hardware person (e.g. you’ve at least replaced a hard drive or installed a CD or multimedia card), opening the laptop up and having a look may be worth it, assuming it’s beyond warranty service. The Best Buy trip suggests that’s the case. If you’ve only — say — added some RAM before, I wouldn’t necessarily attempt this. Opening laptops is a much trickier process than opening a desktop case, though, and you have to be ready to keep close track of screws (which may be of different lengths or diameters) and make damn sure you don’t lose anything or accidentally break a crucial plastic holder-in-placer, and oftentimes getting the keyboard parts back in the
Thanks for all the advice! Unfortunately, my computer screen isn’t even showing an image anymore…when I turn it on now, the Thinkpad just beeps loudly three times. Nothing shows up on the screen. Fairly sure this is hardware failure. I might bring the machine to an authorized service provider, or might just sell this for parts. Either way, I’d like to get my data off this laptop, so, last question for any of you still following this thread: I can just hook this up to an external monitor, right? Thanks again for trying to help.
Here’s the manual. – I’m a big fan of printing out the relevant pages and taping the (screws/small parts) directly to the instructions (with packing tape) where they’re mentioned, but others prefer egg cups or ice cube trays. I don’t see any mention of a video daughter card – Apparently if you pull the keyboard, you can get to where the screen plugs into the motherboard. I’d definitely try reseating that if the safe-mode boot advice above dosn’t work. Matter-of-fact, the ‘LCD-related-systems’ troubleshooting guide (p56) suggests resetting all the LCD related plugs, but it looks like the other two wires in the diagram are to the WiFi and BT antennas.
