Tecra A6 and Alcohol 120% standby problems

Hi,

I have recently bought a Toshiba Tecra A6 notebook with the aTI x1400 graphics card. I am having video problems when recovering from standby after installing Alcohol 120% software (used to create virtual drives from CD/DVDs).

I have narrowed it down to this one piece of software and after doing a factory restore and windows configuration I only have to install this software, I don't even run it to set up virtual drives, and immediately one of the following occurs when I go into standby -

1. The screen doesn't power back on, all the lights indicate the lappie is back up but the screen stays blank, or
2. The screen comes back on but there are vertical columns of garbled characters across the screen, or

3. The screen comes back on clean, but there is video lag to the extent that doing a simple page down in a browser you can see the full page refreshing scroll down the screen.

It looks as though for some reason the video memory might be getting maxed out when going into standby and struggles when it comes back on. This only happens after installing this simple piece of software that has no graphical component to it whatsoever?

Any help is very much appreciated.

Thank you

 

If you are running the ATI Control Center, try disabling the PowerPlay. I have found that it is buggy. There is no solid ATI drivers for the mobile X1000 cards.
Does this problem only happen when in battery mode?

ep.

 

Hey ep,

Thanks alot for that. I have just disabled PowerPlay and will see how it goes.

> Does this problem only happen when in battery mode?
Sorry I didn't even think of that, this is my first lappie. I haven't really used the battery much at all yet and it has happened when its connected to AC power.

 

I have narrowed it down to Alcohol 120%. After I do a restore to factory defaults and then install this program I immediately get both problems, either a garbled screen or the screen doesn't come back on at all. I have tried this on mains and battery and it is exactly the same. It is intermittent though.

Doesn't seem to relate to graphics and I haven't even run Alcohol to setup a virtual drive yet, I have only installed it. But sometimes when the screen does power back on and is not garbled the graphics are very slow, eg just scrolling down this browser page you can see it refresh the whole screen each time. I tried to find an app to monitor the GPU memory but the best I could find was powerstrip but it monitored system memory instead.

Is anyone else having a similar problem or any ideas why this might be happening? Not sure what to do becasue it doesn't seem to be hardware but the machine is useless to me if I cannot fix this. Problem is here in Australia we don't have refurbs and I bought it online and will have to pay freight to return it and get it back again if it is not faulty.

Thanks

 

Can a friendly neighborhood mod please change the heading to:

Tecra A6 and Alcohol 120% standby problems

Thank you

 

Thread title changed