I've had my Toshiba M45-S359 laptop now for two years, and it had been running beautifully. However, it suddenly started to act up. Here's a basic rundown of what it's doing:
1. The touchpad mouse has stopped functioning. Windows recognizes it, and I've tried updated drives and such. But it has just stopped working.
2. The video (from Post to Bootup, and sometimes even after Rebooting) will sometimes automatically lower the resolution to basically 1024 x 768, so the LCD will physically only display within that region, leaving a solid black bar to the right and at the bottom of unused space.
3. Sometimes when the video acts up, the laptop will hang up at it's post.
4. Once it does boot, it will automatically reboot after anywhere from 2 to 20 minutes.
When this first started to occur, the wireless NIC, SD Card slot, and touchpad all failed. I assumed maybe a single board in the front had been the culprit. Then eventually both the SD Card and wirelss NIC came back online, but then the Modem/Wired NIC failed, as well as the touchpad. As it stands now, only the touchpad is still without function (I haven't had a chance to retry the SD slot).
This is something that is occuring with both the Windows XP Home edition that I reinstalled from the Restore CD, and a copy of Windows XP Pro that I installed "clean" with only most-recent device drivers.
I'm assuming that a heat issue is the cause of the rebooting. But would this also affect the other issues?
I've also noticed that the power plug is loose, and sometimes if i simply unplug the power cord, the laptop will get past its post hang-up. But the video will remain reduced thruout my session, and sometimes even after a few reboots.
If anyone could shed some light on to what could be the cause of the problem, I would appreciate it. I will be getting a can of compressed air in the morning and try to blow out the fan / heatsink to see if maybe that will cure the rebooting issue as well as maybe some of the others.
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