Weird T-61p Issue

Hey guys, I've had my T-61 for about a month now and its come up with an odd problem. I had left it running for about 2 days, 90% of the time it was just sitting there idle or asleep, and when it was working, it was mostly internet surfing or music playing. Last night I played a game, and about an hour into playing, the screen freezes, the sound skips really quickly and the HD light turns off. I used the power button to turn it off and tried to turn it back on, when I did, all I got was a series of beeps. No start-up, no HD light, nothing, just beeping. So I let it sit overnight, tried it a few times with the same result. This morning I tried to switch it on, it came up with the Thinkpad start up screen, asked if I wanted to go to safe mode because of the forced shutdown last night, and started loading windows. Part of the way though, HD light switches off, it beeps once, and the screen is frozen. Once again, I power it off, try to restart it and nothing happens. On a whim I remembered my dad had an old Thinkpad that had a bad connector cable and in order to get it to start you had to, no joke, pick it up a little and drop it. So I jolted mine and, violia, it starts right up. Now, when it was starting, it came up with an error in the windows start-up, so I had it revert to last known good configuration and its working fine now.

Any idea what might be wrong? I have a few theories, but they're just made from my observations.

1. Overheating? When it quit on me last night, the bottom was quite toasty. Today it quit on me again, and the bottom was very hot. I downloaded a manual fan controller so I could tell it to run the fans all the time, and its working fine.

2. Motherboard? This might explain the start-up issue, but what about the fans not kicking in? Is that controlled by the motherboard?

I'm going to send it in as soon as schools over, but I'd kinda like to have an idea as to what might be wrong before hand. Any help would be appreciated.

System Specs:
2.0Ghz Centrino
1GB Ram
FX570M
80GB HDD

 

Do you remember the beep pattern? It's trying to tell you what's wrong with the beeping. If it beeps again write it down and look it up in your manual, or online from another computer.

Greg.

 

If I remember correctly, there was one beep, pause, 4 rapid beeps, short pause, 2 beeps with a short pause between them.