The P is for Painful

Turns out I'm not the only person having hardware woes with my Thinkpad T60p. Here's a recap of the day I've had with my beloved/behated lappy:

The day begins by waking up the T60p from its slumber in its port rep at home. Checked mail, read some bug reports, then put it to sleep (suspend to RAM) for its commute to work with me.

Unfortunately, I'd been using the lappy's wifi last night and left the wifi radio killswitch turned off (ie., wireless was enabled), so the system never fully went to sleep (battery light and crescent moon light were both on when I arrived at work); with wifi disabled by kill switch, I can usually sleep/resume w/o incident.

At the suggestion of a fellow *ubuntu geek, Marcelo, I tried the magical incantation, ALT-PrtSC, S, U, B to Synch, Unmount, then reBoot the drive, but it didn't work. So, 4 seconds of power button and a quick reference to Mortal Kombat were required to, ahem, "Finish him."

fsck ran clean and rebooted automatically, but wouldn't actually start, so I had to 4-second-power-button ("4SPB") it again. This time it came up fine, no data loss noted.

Later, I unplugged my power supply to lend to Marcelo, and my USB mouse stopped working. I moved it to the USB port in the T60p (instead of the port rep's USB ports), and it worked (I've seen this before when I close the lid or the system goes to sleep -- the USB ports in the port rep just stop working until I reboot). Then I noticed the PS/2 keyboard was dead. I unplugged and replugged, but still dead. I popped the T60 out of the port rep, and it froze up. Good times. Tried the magical incantation again: no dice. 4SPB killed it, fsck was clean (though there were a lot of things to fix automatically), and again, automatic reboot dumped into a black screen of nothingness (perhaps it was asking for a fingerprint swipe on an inactive screen?). 4SPB a second time, and it booted fine.

Now, after two fsck disk checks and 4 reboots today, my USB mouse works but the PS/2 keyboard does not. I suspect this is because the port rep is not currently plugged in. Why a serial device needs external power is beyond me, but after this I'm returning the port rep for a PS/2-to-USB adapter because these headaches aren't worth the productivity losses.

At least the hangs today haven't resulting in my having to recover my ~/.gaim and ~/.skype folders (which strangely, happens nearly every time I crash and have to fsck manually to recover the drive, because apparently these programs share the same chunk of the drive for their config files).