My thinkpad t40 freezes randomly, at the most within a few minutes of starting. Sometimes I see a slight screen flicker before it freezes. Sometimes it will freeze right at the beginning, before even the IBM firmware screen shows up.

Any help would be appreciated.

Sounds like you may have a memory problem. Try swaping in known good memory or if you have more than one DIMM installed, try each one individually. Other problems could be a balky hard drive or a CMOS issue. If you can access the CMOS you may find a diagnostic option. Running the IBM diagnostics may help pinpoint the problem. Otherwise download and try to run memtest86 (Google for it). This will help identify if the laptop memory is at fault. Finally, try to identify if you changed any system compenents, installed any new sortware, or made any updates immediately before the problem started.

I had the same problems. I think its a problem that plagued the T30's where the bottom memory slot (accessible through the bottom of the case) is potentially faulty, or 'wears out' over time. I experienced the same kind of lockups with the T30 and T40. Today I removed 1 gig of ram stick from the bottom of my laptop. In the last 7 hours I have not had any more problems (to date), and in fact my system seems more responsive, telling me that perhaps there were problems accessing the ram in the bottom slot.