I have recieved a few e-mails about the progress since my last post about the Thinkpad T30 memory issues. I went to the electronics workshop to check up what they would charge for resoldering the motherboard slots. Since they have hourly rates around 300 SEK/hour (~32€/hour) the price would land on either 300 or 700 SEK, but they wouldn’t give any warranty for assuring the machine would work afterwards. I felt the price a bit too expensive and didn’t want to risk this machine, not yet at least.

I went home and waited, and finally the new memory slot cover that Lenovo sent me arrived. The new cover is much more rigid than the old one, and has like a square emboss over it. This allowed me to put a few pieces of paper under it to apply pressure on the slots, making them work. This worked for a few days and then it didn’t again. Probably the solderings get worse when I try to do this, so I have stopped applying pressure to the slots. Now there seems to be no solution to the problem of the broken memory slot than to do a real re-soldering.

One finnish guy, Hobbymat, responded to the last post and wrote the following about re-soldering the Thinkpad:

Greetings from Finland! I have repaired a few T20/T30 series Thinkpads using a very fine-tipped soldering iron (a Metcal, a Weller will also do) and a stereo microscope. In my opinion the memory slot repair procedure does and should not need application of any extra solder as mixing different solder metals (conventional tin-lead mixture used in older Thinkpads or lead-free tin-silver-copper solder used in newer Thinkpads) is not recommended, and it is rather difficult to tell which solder has originally been used. Actually the needed amount of solder metal is already there in the joints – the only problem is that there are cracks that do not conduct electricity any more.

However, it is advisable to use liquid soldering flux applied to the solder joints with a small brush or a “flux pen” prior to re-heating and melting of the individual solder joints one by one. The flux penetrates the cracks in the old solder joints and it will help to remove the oxide layer in the crack when the existing solder melts, producing a good-as-new solder joint.

As spotting all the broken memory module slot joints is by far not easy even for a professional with the best available equipment, it’s best to fix all the solder joints if you decide to go that way. There are as many solder joints to “flux and re-solder” as there are pins in a memory module. That is, 144 joints for a T21 or 200 joints for a T30, and you’ll need to double this number if you are going to use a memory module in both slots! But it can be done, given some time and patience.

This repair procedure is suitable for a skilled electronics hobbyist with access to the tools mentioned above. If you don’t have a stereo microscope, you can also use a jeweler’s loupe, good loupe glasses or a very good magnifier for viewing the work area. However, most likely you can’t spot ANY of the micro-fractures of the solder joints unless you have a decent stereo microscope with a magnification between 10X and 40X. Of course, a very steady hand is also needed for this repair job!

Hope this helps someone

All I need to find now is a skilled solderer that can do this for some cheap money. Since I now live in Linköping it should not be too difficult to find somebody at the Institute of Technology at which I now am studying.

Please comment if you have ideas or other things to add to the discussion about the Thinkpad T30 memory slot failure.