This was a fairly quiet event held at the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. library at SJSU.

I spent most of the time working on a Thinkpad W530 laptop that another fixer had salvaged from his neighbor’s garbage, wanting to save it from the landfill. He didn’t know how it failed.

After running many, many tests on the laptop, we gained the following information:

• Installing/removing the hard drive, CD drive, and CMOS battery did not affect operation.
• With the RAM and battery installed and the laptop plugged in, the laptop would run a POST (power-on self test), show the Thinkpad screen, and then immediately reboot. Pressing the startup interrupt button (enter) did not interrupt this reboot.
• With the battery removed, the laptop ran a POST but did not show Thinkpad screen.
• With all the RAM chips removed, the laptop ran a POST and then beeped to indicate an error. Installing at least one RAM chip in any slot prevented this.
• The only way we found to interrupt the reboot was to turn on the laptop, press the power button, then pull out the battery. This worked intermittently and allowed us to access the BIOS menu. We used this to run a test on the RAM and found no problems with it.
• We attempted to measure the battery voltage, but measured zero volts. This may have been a problem with our measuring probes not contacting the battery terminals.
• When starting up the computer, the battery indicator briefly went orange. This indicates low battery.

Reading this repair manual revealed the meaning of the beep code but little else. I do not know if ripping out the battery is a way of interrupting the POST, or if the battery itself was the problem and ripping it out at exactly the right moment allowed the machine to start up while not detecting the battery issue.