What happened to my A300?

Hello everyone,

I know I don't contribute much, but I'd like to know what your opinions on this are. Yesterday, I left my Toshiba Satellite A300 on for a couple of hours, while I went and did something else for a little while. The reason I left it on was that it was charging my iPod, and I had set it to not turn itself off.

After a couple of hours, when I came back, I noticed that the notebook was off, no LED's, no screen, nothing. I assumed that it was just an error in Vista, and that it had accidentally Hibernated or something. So I tried turning it on, and after about a second, all LED's lit up for about half a second, no screen, nothing, then turned itself off. It didn't even POST. I tried numerous configurations with the battery, AC, holding the power button, nothing worked. I tried reseating the RAM and hard drives, still same thing.

At any rate, I am still covered by warranty, and now it's being sent off to Toshiba for repair. It's going to be about 8 weeks or so. My guess is that it's a typical motherboard problem that can only be fixed by replacing it, or re-soldering the faulty component, although I am certainly not experienced enough to do that.

So does anybody know why this has happened, particularly while it was running?

 

ouch might have been a power surge which might have shoted ur Mobo... could also have been a power surge in ur USB ports or what... really weird

 

Oh, I see. You might be right with surge from the USB ports, I was charging my iPod Touch on there...

 

That sucks Well, at least you still have the warranty.
Could be just "usual" motherboard failure, like defective capacitor finally drying up.

 

Yeah, that's what I first suspected. But now I know not to leave it on for a couple of hours while I am gone.

 

Actually I find it's better to "stress-load" a new laptop for a while just after you get it, while it's easy to return/warranty repair it.
If something is weak, it will fail quickly, instead of unpredictably failing slower in the future, when you are on the road or warranty is void already.

 

Well, I got it back now. They replaced the motherboard in it from what I hear, and it's running fine. I'm not happy with how it came back though, it had fingerprints all over the finish, and there were several changes made to my OS's, including my password being deleted, new accounts made, new icons on the desktop, new power plans, and various other miscellaneous changes. My cables were all messy, they weren't nicely bundled like I had them, but that's probably just me being a perfectionist.

It came back a lot earlier than I expected though, which is excellent.