Travel Technology - My thinkpad x40 just died with a plug in of usb cord?

i'm in the office, fired up my X40, was loading fine, plugged in a usb power cord to charge my Blackberry and whole system shut down and unable to restart it. It's plugged in w/ the AC cord, and still unable to start it via the power button. Any ideas?

ok... now just unplugged my battery and was able to start it up... is this an indicator of a bad battery?

I think the system shuts down if the power draw is too much for the battery to handle (even if the AC cord is plugged in). It happens to me if my battery is too low. It would also happen randomly with a non-original battery I bought off eBay.

My rule of thumb is to keep battery charge > 50%, and AC cord plugged in, while charging a device via usb.

Open Lenovo's Power Manager (from Control Panel|Power Options) and select the battery information tab to check the battery condition.

i figured it out.. was trying to charge my Blackberry Pearl and looks like there is a damaged USB port on the phone. So when the damaged port connected with the laptop, the laptop shut down by default. The phone doesn't charge at all via the USB port. Thanks all

I've had this issue with my dell desktop many times when plugging in a USB skype phone. I often have to reboot with the device plugged in upon boot. There are some safety mechanisms in place assumingly to handle bad connections/ports without damaging the computer.

OTOH, I've seen dead batteries preventing restarts of laptops (with the power cord plugged in).

Similar to the issue I'm having as of yesterday.... (although may simply be coincidental; was installing an external LCD monitor via the VGA port at the time the computer went dead. Monitor works fine and works fine on a different computer)

My 2 year old ThinkPad z61t was working yesterday morning and then suddenly it was not working :(

Plugged into the AC no lights light up at all. The power switch does nothing. I've tried it with a second working AC adapter as well.

It has two batteries in it. I've tried to turn it on with just the batteries and with just one of the batteries.

No joy. It's just dead.

Thoughts? Motherboard issue? :eek:

On the bright side, it could also be just a power supply issue.

Very strange.

This morning it started okay.

Weird.

Does this mean likely that it will happen again? Is this sort of thing usually a portent of things to come?

i'm in the office, fired up my X40, was loading fine, plugged in a usb power cord

Exact same thing happened with my old X40 six months ago. Next day it was fine.
Does this mean likely that it will happen again? Is this sort of thing usually a portent of things to come?

Not necessarily. I cleaned up the hard drive of the X40, dumped loads of old programs and junk, and it hasn't acted up since. I passed it on to Mrs. Gargoyle. It's still working, and it's over 4 years old, a veteran of over 25 TATL trips.