Please help me diagnose this busted laptop

Factual Questions
1

First off, I’m good with computers but bad with electronics.

Anyway, it’s an older T23 thinkpad that won’t boot up. The most obvious problem with the machine is that it doesn’t POST on boot or even display anything on the screen. Rather, what you see are moving blobs of white. The blobs look not unlike what you get when you press an lcd screen with your finger and cause distortions on that area of the screen, except there are never any colors, just shades of grey/white. And these blobs are much larger.

Eventually the blobs stop moving and disappear altogether and the screen is mostly dark. Hooking up the laptop to an external display does nothing; the monitor doesn’t seem to think it’s plugged into anything (stays in power saver mode).

The keyboard does not seem to be responsive – e.g., pressing the capslock key does not toggle the capslock light.

The fan whirs and halts continuously until turning off the machine.

No power appears to reach the drives. The HD does not make any spin up noise and the machine does not change behavior whatsoever if the HD is removed. Ditto if the RAM is removed.

Any ideas what could be wrong with it? Clearly it’s some kind of fault with the electronics, yes?

I don’t really expect to be able to rescue this machine, but I was just wondering if anyone has ever seen anything like it. Thanks

2

First thing I’d do is take it apart completely, and re-assemble. Being a laptop, there’s always a better than excellent chance that the thing was dropped hard and something vital popped loose.

Thankfully, IBM is pretty good at having instructions on how to dismantle and re-assemble their products. The manual for the T23 is lumped together with the T20, T21 and T22.

Ahhh, here it is.

3

I’d have to go with GP on this one.

Question: Does it beep when it’s “booting”? Could be that the memory or processor need to be reseated. . .

4

Thanks, gotpasswords. I guess I can’t make it any worse by taking it apart.

There are no beeps, no POST. The behavior doesn’t change if I remove the RAM altogether and try to boot up.