Computer Troubleshooting

[broady59]

I am a tech with a customer machine Toshiba M45 and the same problem may others have about getting stuck at boot screen (four icons) on a M45 laptop. The computer stops at the boot screen with the four icons and then does nothing. When cold it works fine. I did image the drive and replaced with new hard drive with same image and the same issue occured. Sometimes it will boot to a 3/4 spash screen with a black bar on the right. And freeze there. Sometimes not. It is a shame because other than that it works fine. Occasionally shutdown hangs as well. Let the PC sit 10 minutes and it works again. It looks like some component with a low heat threshold is stopping things from starting. If I keep on and offing the start button, it may start up in once in ten tries. Tried every Bios setting. Upgrade Bios to newest version.

link to others who have identical problem.

www.techsupportforum.com/hardware-support/laptop-support/240135-toshiba-satellite-m45-wont-boot-unle...

[K1]

Hi there,

I have the same problem with my M45-S292 for past 10 days. I tried everything and it is sad that it seems nothing works according to the link you posted. Anyway, when I formatted my laptop it worked fine. I started with XP SP3 and then it was fine, Intel chipsets, it was fine. Then I installed graphic card and windows updates and it rebooted with that 3/4 screen so I thought it could be the graphic card. I uninstalled it and it was fine again!! I even reinstall the graphics (Intel 915) and it was fine still! Then I installed the rest of the updates and Zonealarm and it had problem so again uninstall and install graphics and it worked. I even used it for a day with firefox and web browsing and it was totally fine. So the only things on my laptop were an up to date XP SP3, up-to-date BIOS, drivers (No Toshiba softwares like Common module, power or anything),Winrar, Zonealarm, Firefox and IE 8, wmp 11, vlc media player, and flash player and everything was fine!

So I started by installing these softwares Nero, Winamp, Real Player, Jet Audio, and Babylon and BAM it got the problem and now uninstalling the graphic card does not help anymore! :-(

I may try to play with the WiFi and see if there is a conflict between them, and also uninstalling these recent softwares but the problem is really wired because when it has to be cooled down or wait it means there is a hardware problem that, and by the time of the post in your link I can say that it is not due to a recent update and it is a hardware failure for sure. But the fact that uninstalling the graphic card helps shows that it is a software conflict too!!!

Please keep me posted if you had anything new or found something about the issue

*******

Update : Ok, the wireless adapter uninstall/install did not help but when I uninstalled Nero 8 it was OK and then I reinstalled it and I had the problem again! I do not know what these drivers or software change that causes this hardware problem!!