Stumped, Need Help!!!

[CompTech]

Customers Toshiba Satellite A205 has intermittent shutdown. It keeps turning off at random regardless of being plugged in or battery. Used my own power supply as well theirs and it still shuts down. Replaced fan and heatsink compound and still same problem. ALL VENTS ARE CLEAN AND CLEAR OF OBSTRUCTIONS AND DUST. Doesn't matter if unit is hot or not, still turns off. Sometimes runs for 3 minutes and shuts off. Sometimes runs for two hours. Can't figure this out. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Vicenarian]

Try booting into CMOS and see if it still does it, or boot to a linux distro, to rule out a Windows issue?

 

[Xander]

Yeah, I'd go with a LiveCD. If you can keep it running in that environment then you have ruled out everything but the hard drive and its contents.

 

[tackify]

And you might take a look at the event viewer to see if there's anything interesting.

 

[Nach0]

Did you notice excessive heat/fan noise before shutdown? i have had a few Toshibas (clean exhaust) do this!

 

[Peaceful]

check for a bios update, many satellite models had this problem a year or 2 back.

 

[PcTek9]

Does it shut down with a blue screen? If not it's probably the cpu. If it does, then it's probably the hard disk. Could be related to how much usage the cpu is getting. Good luck.

 

[ell]

Customers Toshiba Satellite A205 has intermittent shutdown. It keeps turning off at random regardless of being plugged in or battery. Used my own power supply as well theirs and it still shuts down. Replaced fan and heatsink compound and still same problem. ALL VENTS ARE CLEAN AND CLEAR OF OBSTRUCTIONS AND DUST. Doesn't matter if unit is hot or not, still turns off. Sometimes runs for 3 minutes and shuts off. Sometimes runs for two hours. Can't figure this out. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Ugh, I had one like this a few months back, never did pin it down, ended up refunding my customer for the cost of a new hd, (the drive was bad too) The shut downs happened very interrmittently, I ran every test I knew, removed everything, ran it from a boot cd overnight and for several days, good luck, let us know what you find!

 

[Skyhooker]

Not to put you to sleep with my same old tune, but whenever I see random shutdowns or freezes I think bad capacitors.

On the other hand, my own desktop machine shut down for no apparent reason several times last week, and reseating the RAM cured it.

Good luck!


Sky

 

[PcTek9]

Yep skyhooker is right, it could be bad caps, or bad ram or mis seated ram. Do you ever feel like computer science is not so much a science as a guessing game?

I had one that did this recently and it was the cpu, just depending on what started up when and in what order... It would just turn off, it was an AMD though and had that cpu power throttle temp in the bios going on... I turned that off and it crashed every time. Guess what it was? THE CPU.

 

[CompTech]

Laptop

This Toshiba Satellite A205 Laptop will run for 5 minutes or 5 hours. Not a heat problem. New fan, and completely cleaned air access. Still checking but because its intermittent, just don't know for sure. Wondering if this is a common problem that Toshiba knows about. Thanks for your answers. Still trying to figure it out!!!

 

[Peaceful]

Apparently you missed my previous post, but yes that is a very common problem with certain Toshiba Satellite laptops and yes they are aware and yes they have bios updates to correct it.

 

[CompTech]

What if the set turns off completely while updating bios? I don't want to blow a $400 board. I don't believe it is a bios problem because the system turns off, no black screen...just turns off completely like someone hit the "off" switch.