I’m having a Toshiba Satellite A100 Notebook ~3yr old. From the past few days, a problem has started to occur, the screen freezes in between and the laptop stops responding at all. I have to shut it down forcefully as even task manager refuses to pop up.
Now the bigger issue, even after forcefully starting the laptop, the display is blank with just a black screen at boot, nothing else.
Overheating isn’t an issue and the laptop is quite cool, as i had it cleaned up myself ~ 2-3 weeks back.
The display cable also seems to be fine, otherwise the display would have acted weirdly when the laptop works.
After a bit of googling, i found out that there could be a BIOS Issue also, so i flashed the BIOS to the latest version before posting this thread, but still the problem persists.
The display driver is ATI Mobility x1400, laptop is running on Windows 7. ATI last updated this driver for Windows Vista only, but i can’t think this as a cause, because lappy has been running on Win7 since last year.
#[member=‘siril_k’] : Well mine is a A100, will the NEC cap be there or not ? I don’t think there’s any other way to confirm it apart from opening the laptop.
the NEC caused problems like laptop freezing when the charger was plugged in. In short, the NEC/TIKON chip was responsible for supplying core volt to the processor. So, the capacitor isnt the OP’s problem here. Probably the North bridge or the Ati chipset will have to re-balled to reflown. And also check with you HDD, one friend of mine had a similar problem, Got to know it was the HDD that was creating trouble.
once or twice, it happened only when i plugged in the charger. The laptop stopped responding. Then after i forced shutdown it, removed charger and restarted, i worked fine but then again all of a sudden thing snapped in b/w.
You cant really check if capacitor is working or not, only thing you can do is remove the capacitor, once removed you can clearly see the damage with a black spot between the dielectrics of the capacitors which means its burned off.
Its Manf Defect from Toshiba which had affected almost all Satellite Series in 2008-09
ok .. one more thing, is there any possibility that the capacitor doesn’t even exists in this particular model, can i check without opening, like if i can procure a circuit diagram of the lappy over the net ? I’m a bit apprehensive abt dismantling the laptop cos last time when i did it, had a tough time !
not sure but the problems you mentioned are pointing towards the capacitor issue rather than display chip issue since a display issue would give you a garbled display hang ups
If you want to check your moatherboard and its component layout without opening up the laptop, you might want to search for the schematics of your laptop model. It will be easy to point out what exactly the fault is. Well the Maxim IC would be a great place to start as it would likely regulate the voltage for the charging circuit.
