This one has me stumped

rydust

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Hi,
I have been doing some work on a Toshiba Satellite 1805 S204 laptop. My friend bought it used off of Craigslist and I went to check it w/ her and it seemed to be perfectly fine. The guy had it running off the battery at the time. She got it back to my house and it was fine until the battery went down. She plugged it in and suddenly the screen started going off and on. First I thought, maybe a short in the adapter. But I plugged it into a monitor and it worked fine. Well, I had noticed that she had opened the laptop screen back pretty far after she plugged it in. So I took apart the display and reseated the connections. Display then worked fine. But it was freezing up. The guy had left a lot of old files the recycling bin so I put in a fresh install of XP and reinstalled her other software. It worked fine but a little slow and I figured that was because it was older and smaller. She took it home for 2 days and the display started flashing off and on again. So she brought it back to me. I plugged the monitor back in and it was flickering too but not as bad as the laptop screen. So I thought bad video card. But it was totally freezing up again. I ran a virus scan but didn't come up w/ anything. Now I am stumped. Bad video card or hard drive? It has 1GB of Ram so that shouldn't be a problem. But on the Crucial.com scan it said that the max memory for this laptop is 512mb. If this guy installed too much ram, could that be causing the problems? I would really like to hear some input on this. Thanks!

Lisa:)
 
Could be the cable from the motherboard to the display. Inverters are fairly common problem.
-Mobo (motherboard could be no good or going).
-What about bios updates,any needed for this model.
-On most laptops there is a litle pin (most of the time above the keyboard) which is used to tell the system if the cover is closed or open.
When you close the cover, it pushes on the pin and the laptop will go in standby mode,maybe look at this area around the pin.
-Are drivers up to date, for display.
 
I have noticed that if the screen has gone black, if I push that little pin, the screen will come back on. But will not stay on. I checked the settings but it doesn't have an option to set for standby. I have had trouble finding any drivers for this model. I did find a driver for the wireless adapter at Drivermax.com. Anyway I will check the pin area and look for driver updates. Thanks.

Lisa:)
 
I would run some hardware diagnostics on it and see what comes up. At the moment there are too many possibilities. Isolate whats at fault and work from there.
 
I checked the repair manual and it doesn't appear to have a separate video card. I have not taken anything apart so far but the display. I have worked on desktops a whole lot but laptops are something I am just learning.

I will run some diagnostic tests on it tomorrow. Thanks to all of you for your advice.:)

Lisa
 
When you say it has 1 GB ram are you just saying that you visually saw the stick of ram or the OS actually says you have 1 GB ram? Either way the GPU is probably going.
 
The guy we got it from said he had recently updated to a total of 1GB. And XP and crucial.com's scan say a total of 1 GB. Two 512mb sticks. I searched the repair manual and can't find a separate GPU. Might be built into the Mobo. Thanks.
Lisa
 
Its has an integrated Trident CyberAladdin-T graphics controller
16MB external UMA VRAM video memory
3D Graphics Accelerator, AGP bus support
2D Graphics Accelerator; BitBLT hardware, Hardware cursor,
Direct Draw support
 
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