After the RAM failure I procrastinated for two weeks before sending the laptop to service and then it took a month (including Christmas and stuff) to get it back. After service they tried to return it to the wrong address by changing the first letter in the street name from S to T and dropping the first digit in the street number. Weird.
According to the notes they only changed “planar” (motherboard in ThinkPad lingo, I think) and “palm rest” but the latter looks the same to me. I just hope that everything works so I don’t have to send it again.
Update I inserted the hard disk, booted memest86 from the grub menu and let it run a few tests. After that I pressed Esc to exit memtest and it said “Halting” but it didn’t shutdown so I powered off. Booting again never lights up the screen! I did see that the display problem was not fixed though. Pretty annoying.
Update 2 next morning The screen lit up properly and the laptop tried PXE boot as I had removed the hard disk drive again. I need to investigate further.