I’m looking for help with my Toshiba Satellite A200, which runs Windows Vista.

Periodically, the screen freezes up in one of two ways: (1) the screen goes dark, or (2) the screen goes dark, except with one or many white squares filled with vertical, shaky lines. In either case, the computer is unresponsive.

The problems tend to occur not while I’m on the computer (though on rare occasions, that’s been true as well), but when I’ve left it sitting running with programs open. While I can work on the laptop for a number of hours without it acting up, it seems like I can’t leave it running for an hour without it freezing up. I’ve also noticed that the computer is no longer utilizing the Screensaver.

Before the problem began (maybe a week ago), I did have a couple months where if I tried to “sleep” the laptop overnight rather than shut it down, I would find it in the morning behaving as though it was not sleeping (though it had slept initially the night before), but also unresponsive and requiring a manual shutdown.

Also, in the last day or two, on a couple of occasions while starting up the laptop, it had to run Start-Up Repair in order to boot up properly.

Please, please, Laptop Freak, any help would be wonderful!

But don’t go rushing out buying a new memory block. It’s better to follow the error finding step-by-step process described, so you can be 100% it’s a bad memory block and not just some software issue.

I bought a Toshiba satellite A660 a few weeks ago (Win7, 4 gig Ram, i7 processor, Gforce Gt 330M if it helps).

my problem is on start up – about a weeka go my laptop jammed on startup and i ended up having to have to use the Toshiba Recovery hard disk tool – basically boots a partition to out-of-box state. Thing is, this installs and reinstalls well (infact i just did this again 30mins ago), but always jams on startup when i switch it off and go to turn it on again.

What happens is that it jams on ‘Windows is Starting’, but the Windows 7 logo doesnt even appear. is this because of incoreectly installed drivers? (thought therye supposed to install automatically) or more likely a hardware problem?

after the 2nd reinstallment i installed COD5 to test it and it worked perfect until the next startup…

Thanks

and the problem is the heat sink on d cpu is full of dust just open a tutorial on how to open a laptop clean the heatsink and fix t again problem solved for sure

as soon as the cpu becomes hot the laptop crashes and it takes 30sec for the cpy to get hot

i tried one more ting

i started the computer without the heatsink its ot got freezed

i took a hair driyer started the pc wid the hair driyer wid cold air facing the cpu laptop worked fine without heatsink

i kno opening laptop is rocket science so try this simple test

simple test turn on the ac and see of u getting the same problem if no then do wat i say

About a year ago I bought an Acer Aspire 5739G laptop. Less than a month later I spilled tea on it. Without sugar (I’ve been told it’s important). I was running some Windows updates as it happened and, whilst in shock, didn’t turn the computer off right away. I just flipped it over and let some of the tea spill out. Only about 5 minutes later it dawned on me that I should turn the laptop off. I left it flipped over by an open window and went to bed.

To my enormous surprise and joy, it powered on just fine the next morning. Nothing was sticky, the touchpad and keyboard were working perfectly fine (externally, you couldn’t tell anything was wrong). I couldn’t believe my luck.

I’m not sure how long after that (my guess would be a couple of days but certainly no more than a week) the computer started randomly freezing up. When it does, all I can do is hold the power button until it shuts down.

About the freezing. Overall I think it’s gotten more frequent as time goes on but recently (during the last couple of weeks) it seems to happen less frequently. Anyway, some things I’d like to note:
1) The computer only freezes in normal mode. With this problem I have to run it in Safe Mode most of the time and it has never frozen;
2) It’s very likely it will freeze within minutes when just powered up (e.g. in the morning) but it will likely work fine if it has run in Safe Mode first (it still can freeze but that usually happens hours after starting it in Normal if at all);
3) Usually the second point is moot if I’m, for example, playing some game right after booting up. I guess it’s because of high CPU and memory usage. Other than that, there doesn’t seem to be any pattern with the freezing-up;
4)The laptop often freezes when starting up. I’m running Windows 7 and when the logo comes up, it often freezes. When booting up in Safe Mode it can freeze as well. When all the drivers have been loaded, I get a black screen and that’s it. Sometimes I have to try three or even four times to get it to work;
5) The freezing is accompanied by a monotone sound/buzz if the computer freezes when I’m listening to music or watching a movie.

The third point would seem counter-intuitive to me if there was a problem with the display adapter, memory (a guess I’ve gotten from a friend of mine) or other hardware (though I’m no expert for sure).

I’ve reinstalled Windows (different versions) since the accident but nothing’s changed so I think we can eliminate possible software or driver conflicts. But maybe it’s important to note that twice or thrice the laptop has frozen up for a second or two and then a message has appeared that says something like: “The nVidia graphics application has crashed and recovered”. The last time this happened was months ago so I may be quite off from the actual message (though the keywords – “graphics”, “crashed” and “recovered” – were in it).

I plan to disassemble the laptop tomorrow and see if maybe there’s any residue left, and clean it. If I succeed and it still freezes up (I think it’s not out of the question that the spillage and the start of freezing was just a coincidence) then I really don’t have a clue about what to do next (aside from getting it to a technician).

Sorry, this was really long but I wanted to provide as much information as possible.