I think I’m hitting the same problem that is reported in this thread on the Lenovo support forums. If I unplug my X60 running Vista SP1, then about 10-15 minutes later, the screen goes blank. Usually black, but sometimes white. The machine is still be running in the background, but there’s no way to kick the machine to redraw the display aside from doing a S3 suspend/resume.
Probably a driver problem. (Is it just me, or do Intel driver updates seem to be really flaky?) I managed to update the driver to the newest one available off the Intel site. Just go to support.intel.com and under the laptop chipsets choose 945 Express. Choose your OS, and download the zip file. If you use the standard “Have Disk..” path through the Device Manager than you can update the driver, even if running the Setup.exe claims that the driver is “not validated” by the OEM for the particular model.
In any case, now I’m running the 7.14.10.1504 version, and have been running on battery for the last 3 hrs or so, and no blank screen yet. I’m sure I’m going to get it as soon as I post this, but here’s to hoping. In any case, it was still useful for me to find out that you can update the driver to the “upstream” intel version directly, so I figured I should write that down, for those people out there still hitting this problem or other driver issues.
In mostly unrelated news, I’ve been playing with the T400 at work, and the Vista install on it is god awful. i feel like the software side of the Lenovo experience is starting to go down the tubes. Not that it was that great before, but this machine launches so much crap when you start up that it adds a good 90 seconds to get to the desktop “steady state”. It’s really disappointing since Lenovo for the most part still makes the best PC laptpo hardware (at least compared to the same-generation Dell’s and Lenovo’s I’ve seen). Oh, except for the touchpad. This is my first Lenovo with a touchpad, and while I prefer them to track points, this particular one seems really flaky. Ok that was my mini review of the T400. Nice keyboard, shitty trackpad, uninstall most of the ThinkVantage crap and you’re fine.