Thinkpad usb related issue maybe trash computer?

**bimmerpc** · 10-13-2007, 02:37 PM

I have a thinkpad a31 that has some strange beep on the motherboard and the power feed is unstable ( it often indicates that I run on batteries although I have the power cord plugged in). I went to a shop and they took a fast glance at it and said faulty motherboard, unable to repair, buy a new one.

My actual only problem that bothers me when using this for car installation is that the usb doesnt work so good. (the power feed actually work on the pc, its just that it indicates battery usage wrong I guess)

Anyway - my setup for usb include, powered hubs, cd, ir, bluetooth, usb-fm, usb card reader, wifi, keyboard, touchscreen controller, pen-drive, and later ibus usb plug. And These devices always fail in some way when using my first laptop - ibm thinkpad a31. It doesnt have usb2.0 native so I use pcmcia card. it installs nice but when resuming from hibernate, standby or even when rebooting, almost always, there are some devices that xp does not recognize after resume. I have tried xp professional and xp home. Also win2000 but win2000 gave me some kind of bluescreen when using my touchscreen driver so I could not find a way to make it work and switched back to xp home.
Anyway it would be logical to think that this usb failure is due to the motherboard problem. I am currently typing this message on a borrowed fujitsu siemens laptop with 3 usb 2.0 native ports on the computer and the exact same setup works perfect no matter how I try to stress it. The usb adapters all comes back from hibernation, standby and reboot. Also - this current setup uses windows vista (maybe more reliable usb support?)

So I guess either it is a xp related issue or related to the computer. I cannot try to install xp on this fujitsu machine because it is incompatible (the xp install crashes :-) ). So I wanna try some kind of last resort and upgrade to something better.

The shop I bought my previous thinkpad a31 says that their current t40 thinkpad is better than my a31 even though my cpu is 1.8ghz and the t40 is 1.5. Can someone agree on that or is he trying to trick me on another computer? At least the t40 has got native usb2.0 ports so that might solve problem and it hopefully does not have the same strange motherboard issue I have

**zapro** · 10-18-2007, 06:43 PM

Hi!

A31 motherboards are known to fail A LOT. You could look @ ebay for another one that's working.

The T40 is with the Pentium M processor, and it's not comparable to the old Pentium 4 by looking at the Clock frequency.

An 1,6 GHz Pentium M in the T40 would correspond to the A31 running 3 GHz or so, and yet, it would be faster, as the chipset is a LOT faster too, and native USB2 i nice too.

Regards, Per.

**bimmerpc** · 10-19-2007, 11:41 AM

thanks
actually I just upgraded to a t40 yesterday and it is soo fast compared to my other a31 =) but it wasnt for free and I wasnt expecting to have to trash my a31 that has worked well before the failure. anyway now its nice to have native usb 2.0

the only problem now is that my roadie soundcard software doesnt like my silabs radio adapter. as soon as I uninstall the roadie software all works fine but I cant use the mixer of course... for example fading between back seat and front seat speakers. It is not a usb power problem because both adapters works and produces sound but its just that the mixer software makes my silabs fm adapter to disconnect and reconnect continously on and off all the time untill I uninstall the roadie software...
hmmmm....