My r100 Won't surf on Batteries

I just got my new (refurb) Toshiba R100 laptop last week and I've been in total love with it. It's so small, it looks like a fancy mouse pad, and yet opens up into a full size computer.

But I've had some issues with using the battery. When I use the battery power, some webpages won't load. I think this is linked to Flash animations. Whenever there is one on the page, the system just won't load any more pages. But I plug in the AC, and it's prefect. The browsers (Netscape, Firefox, and IE), don't crash, they just don't load any more.

Now I've already tried the "High Power" setting, and that doesn't make any difference. Could it be a power settings that doesn't show up in Toshiba's power control panel? What's really frustrating is that the R100 can run FOREVER on battery power, making in the prefect way to surf the web well away from my work station, but I can't really do that because of the webpage problem.

I hope the problem isn't linked to that Service Pack 2. I installed it, first thing, so I've never had a chance to see if this happens without it.

 

It's a good possibility that SP2 is causing your problems. You may want to un-install SP2 or reload the OS from the restore CD's. This way you can verify the problem. I know this is an extreme way to test, but personally, I think it's the best way. Just make sure you backup all your data/drivers before reloading.

-Vb-

 

Well there's the rub.

As you know, the R100 has no built in CD or DVD drive. Well it does come with a lovely extended life battery, an external Drive isn't included. I have ordered a USB 2.0 DVD burner, but I don't know if that can be used as a Boot drive. If it can't, I might have to consider getting one of those expensive "Noteworthy" PCMCIA drives that are recommended for the system. And I really don't want to spend the money on one of those lame things! I got a Dual Layer USB 2.0 x12 DVD burner for 1/3 the money.

I wonder what kind of devices the R100 can boot from? I know the boot menu shows a PCMCIA icon as a Boot device, but what kind of PCMCIA card can be used? CD only? Firewire? Flash cards?

Any ideas on Boot devices I could use?

 

my single biggest frustration with the R100. I bought a USB cd rom, didn't work. I bought a PCMCIA 16bit CDROM, also didn't work (!!!!). bought a usb floppy, but after too many hours of experimenting, couldn't get the boot sequence correct to load the external CD rom. ahhhhh.... I've also recently purchased a USB dvd burner for both my notebooks, and of course it won't work.

the only thing I've had success with is starting Ghost from an external USB2.0 Hard Drive, which is fascinating... since that worked, I tried to load the ghost image from the Toshiba CD's after booting into Ghost, but of course it was password protected and after an hour on the phone wiht Toshiba, they couldn't figure out what the password was (and I had no luck trying to crack it). hmmm.....

anyone else figure this out? boot capabilities to a USB cd rom? (I'm sure the boot files that worked for Ghost USB HD could somehow be adapted...)

 

I don't know if you checked for this specific option, but it's needed to boot from USB.

Look in the BIOS for USB Legacy, make sure it's enabled. If this is not enabled, the USB devices will not boot. Also, the bad thing about enabling this option, it's drops USB 2.0 functionality to USB 1.1, so the speed drops from 480Mbps to 12Mbps. So transfering an OS during install will take a while.

-Vb-

 

Does r100 support booting from a usb optical driver??

 

If your notebooks supports boothing from USB, it should be fine to boot from a USB optical drive. I'm assuming the unit at least came with a USB floppy drive. If so, can it boot using a USB floppy drive? If yes, then other USB devices should work, but no guarantees. Try checking with Toshiba just to be sure.

-Vb-

 

Regarding the original issue with power settings - Toshiba laptop usually have a power save function on the wirless card that runs it in a lower power mode (in other words, slower) when you are on battery. To get rid of it, go to network connections, get properties on the wireless card, and hit configure next to the card name in the wireless network connection properties page. On the advanced tab, there should be some nosense about ad hoc transmit power or power management. Simply set them so you max out the wireless all the time, and you should be good to go.

If this is for a wired card, good luck reinstalling. . .

Pat