Are you up to a challenge?

[Panama Red]

Had a troublesome laptop in over the weekend and I thought it might be fun to offer
a troublshooting challenge. This was a Toshiba Satellite L35-S2194. It came to me
because the owner said the wireless nic no longer worked and she couldn't connect to her
home router or her work router.

First thing I noticed was a rather ugly accummulation of food/drink debris all over the kbd
and surrounding case area. I removed the kbd and all looked clean underneath. I cleaned the kbd to nearly new looking and blew out any dust from the heat sink fins and the from
the cpu fan.

The boot time was quite long and, once loaded, I noticed the original 2006 McAfee AV was installed but wasn't current. The os was XP Media Center and SP3 had been installed. I suspected a malware infection and decided to reboot to Safe Mode to run scanners. I clicked
Start > Shutdown and the Shutdown/Restart option failed to load. The cursor became an
hourglass and just sat there spinning. After a lenghty wait, an "unable to end program"
message appeared indicating the problem was with TPSMain . Even choosing the "end
program" option failed to offer the Shutdown/Restart option. I finally resorted to holding
the power button to force a shutdown, restarted to Safe Mode as Admin and loaded Malwarebytes. I was able to download the updates using a wired connection. Malwarebytes and Spybot failed to find any significant rogues.

I booted again to the owner's desktop and attempted to correct the Atheros Wlan issue. I
used msconfig and services to disable the Atheros wlan utility and enabled the MS wireless
control. It found my wireless signal and made a connection but showed "not connected" as a
status indicator. IE7 was able to connect to the web however, so it really was connected.

Next, I uninstalled McAwful but when I attempted to restart, the system hung again with an
hourglass. After another lengthy wait, a screen said the ATI video bios poller agent
couldn't shut down. Then the same Tpsmain error appeared. Ending both did nothing. Once
again I was forced to use the power button to shut down.

This time, I pulled the hard drive, connected it to one of my machines, saved all the user's
important files and Favorites and scanned with AVG. Avg found nothing amiss.

I put the hard drive back in but decided to remove the wireless nic and see if that made
any difference. Everything booted up ok but when I attempted to access the Power meter tab of the Toshiba Power Saver in the Control Panel, the entire desktop disappeared leaving
nothing but the wallpaper background. The taskbar and all the icons were gone along with
the cursor! The traditional 3 finger salute did nothing. Only option was once again holding
down the power button.

I was firmly convinced at this point that the operating system was pooched and called the
owner to have her find her Recovery Disks knowing full well this would be a destructive
option with any Toshiba laptop. She agreed to the reformat and return to factory orginal
form so I proceeded. Once the Recovery was complete I immediately attempted to access the Shutdown/Restart window. My jaw dropped when I clicked Start > Shutdown and the same hanging hour glass appeared!! I hadn't gained a thing!

I then figured I had missed something during the disassembly and cleaning and opted to
completely disasseble the unit, removed the motherboard and closely examined everything
under a magnifying light. All this revealed no dust/dirt, all the connections were solid and
the heat sink assembly was quite tight. I felt it necessary to check the hsf since I had
noticed a continual flow of heat from the discharge area when the computer hung.

My next thought was to check the ram and hdd with the UBCD utilites. The ram passed just
fine but when I tried to test the Toshiba sata hdd with the IBM/Hitachi utility, the dos
failed to load. A google search revealed this is a problem with the Toshiba sata hard drives.
You can't test them with the Hitachi utility (which usually works with all brands). None
of the other UBCD hdd tools would work with this Toshiba either.

I forgot to mention that I had checked the Event Viewer earlier and it was loaded with Errors
but none of them gave a clear indication of the cause. Most were just delays where the system didn't respond. I then figured I'd try removing all the Toshiba utilities and see if they
were causing the problems. The easiest way to do this was another nuke and pave with MS
oem disks (Windows Media Center). 39 minutes later (yeah, right - ) I was looking at the
same hanging hourglass! The clock said 2am and my mind had grown numb. I leaned once more on the power button and plodded off to bed.

The next morning, as I languished in half slumber, a new solution crawled out of the old
(and I do mean old!) gray matter. I muddled the idea over as I read the Sunday paper,
listening to jazz on the radio and drinking my morning coffee. I figured I had nothing to
lose so I went down the basement to my repair area and gave it a try. To my amazement -
THAT was it!

If you think you have it figured, go ahead and post. I'll give this a day or two before I
post the solution just to see if we can povoke some logical thought.

[minsonngo]

Did it have something to do with the BIOS/CMOS settings?

[bucksfanjimj1]

The WLAN switch was turned off?

[bucksfanjimj1]

So what's the answer Panama? I'm dying to find out.

[Panama Red]

Well shucks, this didn't generate much interest and I plum forgot about it. The culprit was a shorted battery. I pulled the battery out and used a different ac adapter and the thing ran like a new computer. I then tried the original adapter and it worked fine too. I happended to have a good used battery in stock and when I installed it everything ran fine.

The clue was the Toshiba power saver program issues. Accessing it locked things up and it always hung on that program when shutting down. Apparently, accessing a troubled battery confused that program.

[bucksfanjimj1]

I'll have to remember that.

Frankly, I don't think anyone was interested in working that hard for the answer.
Good challenge.

[juppy]

Originally Posted by Panama Red Well shucks, this didn't generate much interest and I plum forgot about it.

I was interested but I just didn't have a clue as to what the problem could be, so I didn't post anything. While reading the original post, every time I'd be thinking "Well....it may be this", the next sentence or so that I read, that was the exact thing you said you already tried! Glad you got it figured out though. That's interesting that a bad battery would do that. I would've probably pulled all my hair out and eventually given it back to the person with this dumb look on my face that says "Pffft, I dunno!"

[Panama Red]

Originally Posted by juppy I would've probably pulled all my hair out and eventually given it back to the person with this dumb look on my face that says "Pffft, I dunno!"

Trust me, I was Reeeeal close to that statement - and I'm probably a few hairs less too!

[jdeb]

i was going to say, "put an Asus motherboard in it".