can anyone help me?

I have an IBM thinkpad P2 laptop with (i think) 256mb memory running win xp pro.

yesterday morning i made an attempt to boot it up while it was plugged into the mains adapter. Upon turning it on i got nothing at all on the screen and yet it appeared to go through the Post and what not ok. i tried at least ten times to get a picture on the screen and even tried Fn and F7 to see if somehow it had been told to display the picture to another screen. No such joy there.

However once i had left it to charge for an hour i turned it back on again and then got a dark grey screen with a black horizonal line halfway down the screen before the screen turned itself off again.

i turned the machine off again and left it to charge for another couple of hours and it booted fine with picture and everything. I dont understand what on earth happened and why if the battery was that dead why the screen didnt come on when i had the machine running from the mains.

can anyone shed any light. its not virused as i dont use it very often and it isnt connected to the internet yet. :o

I believe it could be a number of things...Seeing that it is an older laptop it is possible to be hardware going bad. This can be from loose connectors to actual failing hardware. The loose connectors could be the illuminescent bulb one (the screen gets lit up by it...if you dont get a display take it to a very dark room and see if you can see anything...if you can kindof see something than your conection is bad or your bulb is bad.)

Secondly if it was plugged in it wouldnt matter if the battery is dead or not because it would boot up with a dead one anyways. However, it is possible that your charger is going bad. If you keep having this problem see if you can find a friend who has one and use that for a day or so and see if its ok...ive seen the metal part that connects into the computer get stepped on and it only gives the computer a charge when it feels like it...sorry if this is a lot but it could possibly be a number of things...i hope this aids in your trouble shooting to narrow the problem down.

thanks, its not the charger as the charger is only a couple of months old. im kind of coming to the conclusion that maybe it will be destined for the computer rubbish dump very soon. i've been told that if it is the lamp this will cost more than the actual PC to repair. also i have heard that if the battery is really low (like less then a couple of volts) then it can take time for the actual power supply to start it up.