My Toshiba Satellite 1800 laptop fails to start normally
My Toshiba 1800 will only work if I center it on one knee and press down on the lower left and upper right corners of it at the same time. If I just place it on a flat surface and hit the power button the hard drive light comes on and stays on and I can hear a sound like the A drive for just a second, then nothing. And if I press on it, and get it started if I let go it just freezes right where it is.
You will not believe, but I have the same laptop laying under my bench and it has exactly the same problem. This laptop fails to start until I press firmly on the right side of the palmrest. After that the laptop boots normally but finally it fails again. I believe this problem occurs because of a faulty connection between the battery board and the system board. Your description proves my point. Buy pressing on the laptop sides, you flex the laptop case and make a better connection between the system board and the battery board. You can see the battery board pictured on my disassembly guide for Toshiba Satellite 1800 (step 23). You can try to reseat the battery board, it might help to get the laptop up and running for a while, but I think it will fail again. I’m not really sure witch part is failing and if I would get your laptop for repair, I would quote you both parts. If you really want try to repair the laptop, I would go with the battery board first because it is 6-7 times cheaper then the system board and would cost you about $60. Give me the model name and number for your laptop (for example Satellite 1800-S203, PS181U-00CFC2E) and I can look up a Toshiba part number for the battery board and the system board, so you can search online.
February 17th, 2009 at 12:48 am
Hi Guys,
I think my query fits in this section. So here we go.
I have an IBM Thinkpad R50 and main problem is that it freezes whenever it wants :s. Recently, the hard drive in the laptop was replaced cuz of bad sectors. What happened was that the old hard disk had bad sectors and I kept using the laptop despite of them. Then one fine day the laptop’s screen flickered and was frozen. Mouse and keyboard were non responsive so I had to press and hold power button for a little while to turn it off and turn it back again. When it turned on it showed me a black screen with only battery light and a circular light on the left side of batt light. I took it to the “laptop repair guy” and he said HDD is crashed. so got that replaced and when I brought it back home it was the same old story. Then I took the battery out and tried to start it on bare AC supply nothing happened. Put the battery back again tried to start again without any luck. Then just when I was about to give up it started correctly.
After that I installed Ubuntu in it and everything went well. Then I installed windows in it and everything was fine. however, when I restarted the system it stuck at the start with a black screen and same two lights. Since then, sometimes it starts ok, but feezes as soon as I start to do anything. Sometimes, it freezes at the start or during the start up. and everytime I have to turn off the laptop and turn it back again using power button. I have tried to start it with and without battery sometime it starts ok with battery and other times it doesn’t. sometimes it starts ok without battery and other times it doesn’t. Sometimes, it feezes when I move the laptop or type anything or use trackpoint/touchpad other times it works fine despite these actions. Don’t know what to do?
I have tried to test the motherboard,RAM using lenovo’s system toolkit utility in windows and it didn’t show any problem. I was testing HDD using the same utility and it freezed up on me again. The problem persists in windows as well as linux. Will try the memtest now. Please suggest what can I do? and how can I proceed?
I am really sorry for the long post but couldn’t do without it.
Thanks for a wonderful site.
Syed
December 9th, 2008 at 11:39 pm
usdadventist,
Did you test the laptop with an external monitor attached to the VGA port? Find out if the external video output has the same problem. If the same problem appears on both internal and external screens, there could be a problem with the video card.
December 9th, 2008 at 11:35 pm
Hemant,
I would suggest diagnostic test on the hard drive. You can use some tools from the Ultimate Boot CD (Hitachi’s DFT test included in there).
December 9th, 2008 at 5:34 pm
I have the same problem! I have a gateway 450ROG and was going to turn into a DNS and web server, but after i tried to connect to the internet in PCLinuxOS, it would not and the screen got fuzzy and started blinking and then it seemed like it was going to give up! I know its not a software problem because the same problem appears with Ubuntu,Kubuntu and the Live CD”s even when the BIOS rarely appears it happens. I tried vacuuming it and cleaning out any dirt, and it helped for a while, then it just stopped. Fan on and lights but no screen.
November 21st, 2008 at 3:41 am
Hello,
First of all thank you very much for this wonderful website. I think millions of people would have been benefited from your website. I have Toshiba Satellite M45-S355 which is Intel/Windows XP based 3 years old laptop. Everything was working fine untill I allowed Service Pack 3 to get installed on my system in September08. I started facing so many problems so I decided to use recovery dvd as nothing else was working. After using recovery I am having laptop freezing issues. It works fine in SAFE Mode. But in normal mode after sign in it freezes after 15-30 seconds.
I run memtest86+ and it successfully completed 2 passes. I havent tried hitachi hard drive test that you mention here. Laptop is even freezing in clean boot up in Normal mode.. I am lost here.. Any help from you will be greatly appreciated..
Thanks
November 7th, 2008 at 8:17 pm
I have a Toshiba P105 laptop with a very annoying problem. Frequently when the computer boots up both the keyboard and the touchpad are completely disabled, including the power, media, and other hot buttons located above the keyboard. Once windows finishes booting I can navigate if I plug in my USB mouse but when I try to restart, shutdown, log off, hibernate or standby, the computer will go through the motions and finally hang on a blank black screen. The computer is still powered on and remains in this state indefinitely until I physically pull the battery. After this it boots normally as if nothing has happened. Any ideas?
November 7th, 2008 at 8:50 am
When it freezes all the led’s hd n dvd drive goes off and the fan stops to spin
November 7th, 2008 at 8:44 am
I have a toshiba satellite m40x-183. its 3 yrs old. the laptop seems to be working until recently my ethernet port went down. The green led does not flash.. i use a router to connect to the internet. so i connect it with usb port as the ether port was not working. Now the usb ports too seems to stop working. Unknown Device is still listed under the usb hub in the device manager even though i disconnect all my usb devices. and the computer freezes at random times. so i decided to format. the windows setup get stuck randomly, sometimes at format screen,copying files..
Few days these problems started our area was struck by lightning and all the phone lines went bad..
Pls help..
Thanks