IBM ThinkPad 600E Troubleshooting

The battery life runs out quickly.

The power adapter that comes with the laptop can become damaged. You would have to buy a new adapter.

It is known that after a while, the battery life of any device decreases. What you can do is replace the old battery with a new one, which will increase the laptop life. To increase the useful life of this new battery, try to run the laptop from a wall outlet as much as possible to reduce charge and discharge cycles so it lasts longer. The battery gets damaged when the charge drops too low. To prevent this do not let the battery life drop below 50%.

The entire keyboard or individual keys could not work.

Over time the cable that connects the keyboard of the laptop to the motherboard could become loose. Remove the keyboard and carefully disconnect the ribbon cable. Check the ribbon cable and connector for any damage. Afterwards, carefully reattach the ribbon cable and reinstall the keyboard.

The keyboard could be broken. The whole keyboard will need to be replaced. Make sure to buy a compatible keyboard that works with this specific model of laptop, and try to buy it from a reputable reseller if you can.

The laptop power goes on but the screen is black or shows nothing.

Shut down the computer. Use an extra fan in the room to help to cool down the system. After a 15 minutes pause, restart the computer.

Connect the computer to a different power supply outlet and restart the equipment, if this does not work. You can try using a VGA cable connecting it to an extra monitor to make sure your computer is running good, and the problem is only the monitor. Besides, you can try to take a look inside the chassis to make sure that there are no bent or broken cables when checking the pins and connectors within the motherboard.

If you installed recently hardware drives and your screen is blank, the problem might be that they probably were corrupt drives. To solve that, you need to get rid of them. Try to restore the system to a previous stable configuration. Uninstall all the external added drives like printers, cameras, scanners, until your computer returns to normality.

To verify if it is a problem with your hard disk, you can start the computer and see if the fan is running. Make sure that all lights in your computer are on. Finally, reboot it to see if it works. If it doesn't work, then probably you will need to change your hard disk.

The files open and the programs run very slowly.

If you find out that your laptop started to work slow, you should scan it for viruses. If you find viruses, you are recommended to delete the infected files. The viruses make your computer “sick”, and if they are not eliminated immediately, your device may even stop working at all. It is also recommended to scan your system regularly.

This is one of the most common reasons why the device performance is inefficient. In order to save some space on the Hard Disk Drive (HDD), delete the files which you think you will not use in the future. Do not forget to empty the Recycle Bin on your computer regularly. There are some temporary files which can take some space, so you can also delete them. To do that, open My Computer, select the local drive (mostly it is Disk C), and open “WINDOWS” folder. There you can find “Temp” folder, where all the temporary files are kept. Select all the files which were created more than a week ago, and delete them.

Sometimes the Hard Disk Drive (HDD) itself should be replaced because it was damaged. That may happen if the laptop was dropped, or it was in contact with water. However, the hard drive may be just too old, and starts to work slower. In both cases, you are recommended to buy a new HDD. When you buy a new hard drive, you can buy one with a larger storage. If you have more storage, the laptop will work better. You can also buy a Solid State Drive (SSD), which will increase the speed of your laptop even more.

Random Access Memory (RAM) is the memory which accesses the data from the main storage. However, its speed directly depends on its own memory size. If the device has not enough RAM storage, it will start to work slower. Therefore, you may want to add more RAM memory to solve the speed problem.

If the computer heats up, it will start working slower to prevent it from overheating. Cleaning the dust from the inside can help to prevent overheating. In general, if you keep your hardware clean, it will perform better.

The fan makes a lot of noise.

Having a lot of processes running in the background causes heat to be generated. The heat generated causes the fan to work extremely hard, which causes it to be noisy. To close some processes, go to ‘’Search’’, find ‘’Run’’, and search for “msconfig’’. Click “Startup” and disable some processes.

Another cause of a noisy fan is that there might be dusty. If you can, open up your laptop while it is off. Then use a can of compressed air to blow out the dust. If you cannot open your laptop, use a can of compressed air and indirectly aim at the fan and blow the dust out.