[ltp] T60 freezing after (unrelated?) hw update

[Jesse Sheidlower]

I have a two-year-old ThinkPad T60, running Debian. It
recently developed some screen problems--the display was
losing colors, and finally started to die completely, going to
black shortly after startup--so I sent it back for a warranty
repair. I pulled the hard drive before I shipped it.

It's back now, but the machine is now locking up hard at
various points in the boot process. The first few times it
froze at "Setting the system clock"; then at "Activing
swapfile swap". Now it is booting all the way and letting me
log into Gnome, but then locks up soon after.

I then tried to run SimplyMEPIS from a Live CD, but this, too,
locked up hard a few seconds after getting to the main GUI
screen.

Lenovo included a note saying that they had also upgraded the
BIOS and embedded controller--to 2.23 and 1.07 respectively.

I'm running Debian unstable, kernel 2.6.29-2-686.

I'd be very grateful for any suggestion about what might have
caused this, and for how to evaluate and fix it. If this is a
bad-luck coincidental hardware failure, I'll send it back for
further repair, but if there's something else going on--BIOS
conflict, say--it would be best to know that.

Thanks.

Jesse Sheidlower