Girlfriend\'s laptop just died, need HELP troubleshooting.
 

My girlfriend has a Toshiba Satellite A105-S4384 Laptop. She uses it mostly for gaming. Today while she was playing it completely froze up with a blank screen, this has happened before and she just unplugs the power cord, removes the battery and pops it back in. Today when she tried to start it back up it comes to the windows error screen where it asks if we want safe mode, last good known config, or normally. Now typically I am a pretty good windows troubleshooter and have been able to fix 98% of my problems on my own but I have never not been able to get to safe mode. All options result in a few things starting, then the PC completely restarting and coming back to the same screen.

Ive tried googling this and came up with several things.

A. Some sort of error with the boot settings. The problem here is that the OS is OEM and all I have is the toshiba disks which are useless unless I want to do a full reformat which I'm not sure is necessary yet.

B. Overheating? I also read the chronic restarts could be caused by overheating in which case the PC would shutdown as a safety feature? We are both smokers which I also realize could be a problem. I tried hitting the main duct with a duster but it didn't fix the problem. I have a tool kit and I am comfortable enough looking under the hood but I'm really not sure what I need to be looking for.

Any suggestions?

Re: Girlfriend\'s laptop just died, need HELP troubleshooting.
 

Laptops aren't designed for gaming so I would guess it has overheated. Best bet is to try a BootCD & run some recovery tools. I've used HDD Regenerator a couple of times recently which has saved me from doing full reinstalls.

If you can't get it booting then try sticking in the XP disk and doing a reinstall. If that doesnt work it's probably [censored].

Re: Girlfriend\'s laptop just died, need HELP troubleshooting.
 

If you open the case, start with the simple stuff: cable connections, memory modules and boards seated, power connections, etc., and, of course, clean out as much of the dirt, cat hair, etc. from inside. If you're really lucky, this will fix it. I would make the reformat/reinstall the option of last resort. It might fix it, but this could be a hardware problem. If it is, a reformat isn't going to help. If you do manage to get it to boot, Go into the "System" control panel, "advanced" tab "startup and recovery" section, "settings" button, and uncheck "automatically restart". This is probably the dumbest setting in Windows XP, and it is on by default. It prevents you from seeing the blue screen with error message when you have a problem, and just throws you into an endless cycle of rebooting.

Now, of course, the error message on the blue screen will still require some research, as it seems to be Microsoft policy to fire any programmer who writes a comprehensible error message, this policy being most strictly enforced for errors that make you machine unusable, but it at least gives you a place to start.

Re: Girlfriend\'s laptop just died, need HELP troubleshooting.
 

I used to get stuff like this with my laptop. Posted the problem here and spyware was the concensus opinion causing overheating due to running the processor too hard.

Anyway, after getting my super mini screwdrivers out and cleaning the thick dust off the fans, it was back up to full speed (and I got rid of the spyware too). So I would suggest cleaning out the fans and seeing if that works.

Re: Girlfriend\'s laptop just died, need HELP troubleshooting.
 

[ QUOTE ]
If you open the case, start with the simple stuff: cable connections, memory modules and boards seated, power connections, etc., and, of course, clean out as much of the dirt, cat hair, etc. from inside. If you're really lucky, this will fix it. I would make the reformat/reinstall the option of last resort. It might fix it, but this could be a hardware problem. If it is, a reformat isn't going to help. If you do manage to get it to boot, Go into the "System" control panel, "advanced" tab "startup and recovery" section, "settings" button, and uncheck "automatically restart". This is probably the dumbest setting in Windows XP, and it is on by default. It prevents you from seeing the blue screen with error message when you have a problem, and just throws you into an endless cycle of rebooting.

Now, of course, the error message on the blue screen will still require some research, as it seems to be Microsoft policy to fire any programmer who writes a comprehensible error message, this policy being most strictly enforced for errors that make you machine unusable, but it at least gives you a place to start.

[/ QUOTE ]

The automatic restart thing makes sense. I didn't have much luck taking the system apart [img]/images/graemlins/frown.gif[/img] I need to find a better guide on these specific systems. My main problem here is that I don't have a windows system disk to try and boot from. All I have is the Toshiba recovery disks which can't do anything other than reformat everything and reinstall. Is there any weird way to get in and change that setting that i don't know about?

EDIT: Just watched it try to boot again and it does go to a blue screen for a brief second before restarting....sigh.

Re: Girlfriend\'s laptop just died, need HELP troubleshooting.
 

A friends Dell had a similar problem. We found out one of her RAM sticks was bad. Maybe try taking a stick out and see if it boots up, if not switch sticks and see?

Re: Girlfriend\'s laptop just died, need HELP troubleshooting.
 

If not try getting a new hard drive

Re: Girlfriend\'s laptop just died, need HELP troubleshooting.
 

[ QUOTE ]
If not try getting a new hard drive

[/ QUOTE ]

Totally forgot it was under warranty, HD was busto, got it replaced free.