Toshiba Satellite 5105-s501

Thanks for the link, vij, but we're (or at least I am), still thinking about class-action, as I, and some others, have already have their notebooks fixed. Maybe we could get compensated for the repair costs ? I don't know

 

@ xAMDvsIntelx
If i'm not mistaken, in the recent 6100 settlement, certain people who had had repairs on their machines were entitled to more compensation from Toshiba. I don't know the exact details off the top of my head, but compensations went up to as much as $1000-$1500.

@everyone
The only way to get Toshiba to compensate is if we take legal action. And the good news is that the compensation will almost certainly reimburse any repair costs that we incurred and possibly much more.

Basically, we just need to do what the 5005 and the 6100 people did. Organize and do our bit, which is to send a short email to the right person. In our case a lawyer who is looking into this pending class action litigation against Toshiba.

I don't want to hijack this thread with the lawsuit details, so I'll just say that more info about what we all need to do is over at the msn forum.

This is probably our only chance at making this lawsuit a reality. One person can only do so much in a class-action litigation. So lets all give it a shot. And spread the word.

Thanks for reading guys.

Vij

 

I have suffered the problems shared by so many of the other people who have posted here, so I probably won't be adding much to the discussion.

My problem started suddenly, without any event which seems to have triggered it, and the trend seems to be downward. Currently I have turned off hardware acceleration, and as long as I avoid major 3d applications, things are fairly stable, if slow.

I contacted Toshiba's tech support and was treated cordially, though I was told right off the bat the problem was with my video card and that the only software option I could try was the changing of drivers. I was directed to try a local Toshiba repair site, and told that repair was possible, but would likely take some time.

Having followed the discussion here I have two questions, is it a viable solution to attempt to go through a local repair center? That is to say, does the part exist to replace, and if it does, I assume I'll be paying through the nose for it?

Secondly, Vij, if the lawyer you are in contact with wishes for emails directly from people who are currently experiencing the problem, why route them through the msn groups page? Would it not be easier to go ahead and post that page or email address directly here?

My thanks for your time, and my apologies for the inconvenience.

 

Toshiba is aware of the problem and is afraid of class-action from the 5105 owners. The cost to repair your laptop could range from 300-600 USD depending on where you take your notebook in for service, and if they have the GPU readliy available. Hey vij, thanks for the responses - so if we (that's to say you, with us) win the case, we get reimburstment for our notebook repairs?

 

@minigendo
You have a reasonable point about posting the info on the lawyer here. There are two reasons I didn't do that.
i) Certain forums have rules against explicit talk of legal action (i know notebookforums.com does)
ii) I thought it would be easier to communicate in the future if we all gathered over there for the legal discussions and stay in our respective groups (like here and notebookforums.com) for the technical discussions. So that any legal developments can be followed over at one place, rather than for people to flood the technical forums with legal matters. Not to mention the doubled efforts in keeping everyone uptodate.

Well having mentioned those reasons. In the interests of getting this thing to go ahead. Here is the site where you'll also find the lawyers address. Hopefully the link doesn't get x'ed too soon.

http://www.lorisklar.com/toshad.htm

@xAMDvsIntelx
Yes, assuming Toshiba decides to settle the case along the lines of the 6100 series. I think by law they'll have to provide us with a compensation and/or a solution if they lose the lawsuit. If they decide to settle, I'd guess they'll go along the lines of their previous settlements. But we might get very little or nothing if we don't have a strong enough case. But if that is ever going to happen, we all need to take the first step together, and soon before this thing fizzles away.

@everyone
It is very clear to us that this problem is not just limited to a few of us. Almost everyday new users are signing up reporting the same corrupted display problems. This is a design flaw. One that extends from the 5005 series to the 6100 series. The difference is that those two classes of users got a settlement because they acted.

We can't expect a lawsuit to happen magically. We have to provide a minimum bit of info about our experience to the investigating lawyer so that they can make a well informed decision on whether to press the case or not.

For the really lazy among us, just copy and paste some of your posts from this thread to the lawyer's email at the toshiba litigation chronicling the problems you've had. I did something along that line as well. Anything helps, and large numbers do make a difference.

Thanks for reading guys.

Best,

Vij

 

I suggest contacting abaxter or Brian (the site Admins.) to see if you'll be able to use this entire thread for your case.

 

I dont know if my problem is really related to this thread, but this seems to be the most informative forum I have seen. My 5105-s501 started acting up on Friday jan 20. I was playing Americas Army and the screen locked and nothing worked. I all I could do was press and hold power button and then it would turn off. I rebooted and tried AA again and it happened again. So I started comp again and just surfed the web for a while and then it did it again.

Finally I just left it alone and went to bed. Saturday it started working again and I let adaware run all day and it was fine. No more problems... then I started AA again and within 15 minutes same thing. But now I cant even turn comp back on. Just the power cord icon flashing yellow. Is this related to the video problems here or did my laptop just die?

Thanks for input.

 

No, it shouldn't just die on you - the problem seem subtle for me at first, then escalated until it rendered the notebook useless. However, I would not recommend taxing the notebook's GPU, as it is faulty, which may be causing your notebook serious problems. In other words, don't play games on your notebook (if you can even get it to work).

 

I too have the screen lockup, glitches and blue screen for my toshiba 5105-s501. I put a heatsink on all chips on the graphics card, cleaned the fan, and heatsink, and still I get crashes. I have owned it for a few years and at the end of my extended warranty with compusa took it in for service. They sent it to toshiba, and returned it to me with my HD wiped. This occured although I specifically told them my problems were hardware related. The graphics issue, and my DVD/CDrw problems were never solved. Toshiba places blame on Compusa, and compusa blames toshiba.(At least compusa terminated their tech manager) I'm a navy EET veteran, professional AV bench service tech, soon to have a B.S. in EE and CE and cannot recieve assistance from toshiba on this issue, so I think we're outta luck.

 

Well, the GPU isn't having any overheating problems - I've found that the GPU's Video RAM has gone bad. Once all the RAM in the GPU goes bad, you won't be able to use the GPU anymore. I'd still try and seek replacement for your notebook through CompUSA and/or Toshiba if you're still under warranty.

 

I have found that if I remove the pcmia slots, raise the unit off the desk and have a 10 inch fan on constantly I never have any lockups or glitches. Although this isn't a permadent fix it has allowed me to backup the data that I needed.

 

Hello!

I am another victim of the Toshiba Nvadia G-Force 440 pixeling screen. My laptop went slowly to it's death at the end of last year and I've been too busy to get it fix until now. I took it in to Geek Squad to see what was wrong and they call the other day and said that my motherboard was bad and that the repair cost was $866.00. Oh, My Goodness!! Needless to say I was shocked!

Luckily, I found this forum! When I get my laptop back I will give Toshiba a call myself. Even though I bought my Toshiba 5105-S501 back in August of 2002, I am hopeing that Toshiba has finally had enough complaints that they will fix my laptop out of warranty. If not, I am add me to your list for class-action members! I think 3 years is too young for a computer to die!


Thanks for all of your posts!

 

We could get the Better Business burearu to jump in. They have a website that is easy to make a complaint through and if you word your letter right they will probably be forced to give up some money to you. Be sure to write it candidly but still state as much inforation as you can that makes them look bad and unwilling to help. Businesses are normally are scared of the BBB so we could use this to our advantage.

 

Hi, All:

I have encountered the same problem as many of you with Toshiba Satellite 5010-s501 and I am not able to use it any more. This morning when I called Toshiba (1-800-457-7777) to make my complaint. I was referred to a local repair center who wants to charge me hundreds dollars. When I turned back to the Toshiba customer services to discuss this issue because it is a defect in their design and manufacturing, I mentioned that many customers have got the same trouble, so they should be aware of this. Their answer was there are no records in Toshiba regarding the complaints of this Toshiba model ! Do you believe it? They offered to connect me to their technicians for consultation but I would be charged $30.

Question 1:

Who has the name of that customer relation manager (a lady, right)?

Any further news about legal action against Toshiba? I will definately join the action!

Thanks

Pengchen

 

Hey, i was wondering if you found a solution to this yellow light problem? my computer will no longer turn on, but it blinks a yellow cord light on the front...
Is there an alternative way to turn on my computer aside from the power button? Any help would be great. Oh and also i have the geforce card of death on my 5105 so i'm in the same boat with all of you

 

Hey, I found that removing the power cord, then the battery, then replacing the battery and plugging in the power again will get you back to green light power status.
I too have signed up for the dreaded 5105 class action...make sure you do too.

 

How and where do I sign for the class action??
My Toshiba Satellite 5105 505 died 3 weeks ago. I bought it in May 2002 and was doing perfectly fine until last month (the screen gets pixelated and then it freezes)
Let's have Toshiba do something about this!

 

Hello, I worked on my friends Toshiba Satellite 5105-s501 and found that the unit had bad colors and that the screens pixels would be really bad. In safe mode everything would be ok. This told me that I would need to shut off the Nvida card. In safe mode I shut off the device. /went to device manager and selected the video display, selected Nvida card, selected disable device./ Booted normally and this worked well and now the computer is working without seeing a dead screen or bad pixels on the screen. I don't think it'll handle games as well because it not utilizing the video card in the motherboard to the extreme, if I'm not mistaken it's using AGP. I've noticed that the laptop gets really hot. This may burn out chips or make the end points to chips not contact the soldering points on the motherboard. Usually high end video cards have a fan right on the chip. On this particular model I don't see a fan on the card. Just in the back where the processor is. On e-bay I saw the video card for sale for this model. It was really cheap. Don't know if it works but it was there. As vb states this model has a replacable video card on the mother board so I would just buy the part and have someone replace it. I'm going to replace the one for my friend if they buy it. =)

 

Hello!

I last posted quite soem time ago- same problem as everyone, and when I called, after a bit of runaround, Toshiba agreed to fix it and did, as I reported here. Well, that was about 14 months ago and last friday it did the same thing- only this time it died a faster death- and I had everything backed up kinda had lost my faith in puters...

Anyway I figure what happened was they simply replaced the defectively soldered Vid Ram with a new defectivley soldered Vid Ram and it went again, as it would. So I came here having found notes on the heat gun solution and that that was a fix rather than a replacement with a similar defective part and I would give that a shot if I could find someone to give me a clue as to how to open this thing up! Gosh they are tightly built! My thanks to whoever posted that link- which I shall go look at in a moment.

I aslo note the attempts at class action suit and will be checking that out.

I am also awaiting a promised return call from Toshiba Customer Service rep after my call this morning telling them I expected them to repair their defective repair of their defective part and that this has nothing to do with in or out of warranty.

Yes, a $2400 machine should last longer than 3 years.

I have replaced it for the moment with a $648 Acer Aspire 5610Z from Walmart which is very good- all the bells and whistles including 120 G HDD and 1 gig Ram (but still won't play Doom 3 damn it!) and a CD tray that handles and burns anything and everything including dual layer DVD's. The only down side and why I need my Toshiba back is it is Vista- and Vista sucks!!! For one thing, it won't load many of my programs. Including Adobe Acrobat 5 which is rather vital to my publishing acitivities. (It also won't run properly the latest Acrobat and of course, MS and Adobe blame each other, but by my experience MS has not run Adobe properly since XP SP1.)

Oh, and just for the record, I expect this 648 dollar laptop to last more than three years too.

A friend of mine was in on that earlier clas action settlement and got a nice check- and used it to buy another brand of laptop...



Jud

 

I have gotten a Toshiba 5105-s501 and It gave me the IDE#0 Error, so I looked at the hard drive, and there wasn't one. Bought one, put it in, now I try to boot and it gives me an IDE#1 error, I'm not sure but I think that means the optical drive. Anybody know how to fix this? 'cause if I don't fix the optical drive, then I can's boot.

P.S.
I have an extra laptop CD drive (Older, but not too, but it is from Sony, may fit, may not) , I'm not sure if it is the drive or the cable, or the receiver (female port).

 

Okay...Here's my story...

my toshiba satellite 5105 has the same problem. it quit on my brother and so he just put it away in a closet for a while (don't know how long but a WHILE because the battery wont even last 10 minutes from a full charge until it dies- i'm getting another battery). i discovered it and he said i could just have it...so he told me of the problem and i set out to test it and such. sure thing, it pixelates while watching DVD's and playing graphics games. after a while of pixelating, rebooting, and being fine for a few minutes then pixelating again, it finally gave me the blue with white lettering message of death and shut off. i pushed the power button and it turned on with the toshiba booting screen but stopped with a black screen (it was still on, it was that ominous lighted lcd screen but black in color). on, off, on, off no change. i was forced to install windows xp sp2 (same disk from my desktop comp) and all seemed well until playing a java-powered "RISK" game when it started flickering again and pixelating. and so here i am, typing this plea for help!! (side note: i can't rest my palms on the laptop while typing cause it flickers and threatens to die). after reading these posts, i am wondering a few things:

1. has anything come of the class-action legal attempts? can i join? that lawyer's link doesn't work.

2. i also read something about soldering on the card itself...can anyone clarify please? I have opened up the laptop once before (an accomplishment for me to not lose all the screws or have extras afterward) and I imagine soldering itself can't be too difficult (have a step-dad engineer and supplies to do so) although i know you have to be careful to not jump any connections and stuff like that. i am not a professional electronics engineer or anthing but just have an interest in electronics (and their insides). For those of you who have sucessfully done this soldering "fix" i would be in huge debt of gratitude if you would provide a detailed instruction on how to do it...keeping in mind that I can still use the laptop full-functionally since the re-install of windows but i have to be careful not to press on the areas to the sides of the touch pad or move the screen while watching movies or playing the games...keeping this in mind, i don't want to completely destroy the laptop and that's why i dont want to try soldering on my own as a newbie...hence the request for a detailed instruction...Please!!!

 

i guess i should also add to my above story that my brother (before retiring the laptop to the closet) took it apart and replaced the graphics card with antoher slower one- still the same problem

and so, the original graphics card is back in and now is in my posession.

does this mean that doing anything to the card itself (ie reflowing the solder) will even make any difference because the problems does not lay in the video graphics card? or is there something i am not understanding?

Thanks!