Some Toshiba laptops, like mine, have a weakness that the heatsink gets filled with dust about every year or so, and thus the computer overheats and shuts down when the environment gets too hot. I’ve had mine in for cleaning twice, but now my extended warranty is over, and I need to try it myself.
I’ve read some directions, and have the right screwdriver for the job, and bought myself a grounding strap and a bunch of cans of compressed air today. However, Fry’s sends it to Toshiba to do. That means it is either hard or someone at Fry’s knows the competence of their repair department.
It doesn’t sound too hard, based on what I’ve read, but I’d rather get some direct Doper input.
Thanks all. I’ll do a total backup before I start, know a repair place, and am willing to accept the risk. But I really, really don’t want to get stuck with Vista.
One of my laptops is a Toshiba. I haven’t tried to clean out its heatsink, but I’ve seen instructions for a couple of models of Toshibas.
I think an important question here is how comfortable are you at doing things like changing CPU chips and RAM and that sort of thing? You mentioned a grounding strap which puts you above some of the technicians I know (heh).
The important thing to remember is that it’s a laptop, which means it’s designed to be small, not serviceable. On some of the Toshibas, you can’t just remove the heatsink. It is permanently attached to the CPU. You have to pull the entire heatsink/CPU out as a single unit, and in order to do that you have to loosen a few screws that aren’t all that obvious if you don’t have the instructions. If you miss the screw that’s holding the CPU in place, you can break stuff. Make sure you have the right instructions for your model.
If you are comfortable replacing chips, I say go for it. If you’ve never even swapped out a desktop CPU chip, maybe you want to consider letting a shop do it.
I designed and fabbed boards for my bachelor’s thesis, but that was a long time ago. I do have data on which screws to take off, and the T6 screwdriver to use for them.
I’m actually going to start with vacuuming out the case, and then blowing compressed air around. Some of the posts said that this helped. Removing the heatsink is a last resort. However, it seems that you can get it off the CPU, without removing the CPU. I believe it is socketed, and one poster got it back when he removed it by accident, but I’d rather not try.
I collect data on why CPUs fail for a living, so I’m more paranoid than most.
Sorry I don’t have an answer to your question but I remember you mentioning this in some other thread and I don’t know if you ever answered it, and I can’t find it now. But do you happen to know which models were affected by this problem? I can’t seem to find any good info on it. I’m curious because my satellite P105 seemed to have this problem and I could never figure out what it was, since there didn’t appear to be any visible dust when I opened it up.
Sorry, I don’t have a list, but if you Google for Toshiba Satellite heatsink shutdown you’ll find several message boards with information.
Since I haven’t done it yet this is not first hand information, but the posts I read seem to say that you don’t see the dust until you remove the heatsink and get access to the fins.
Not all do it. My daughter has had one for about 3 years (later model) and has never had this issue, and she used it in a worse environment than I did.
The best indicator of the problem is sensitivity to CPU activity and/or heat. I’ve put it in reduced power mode, which helps. Doing a virus scan, or trying to play a CPU intensive game, kills it quite quickly. I was at a meeting two weeks ago, in Texas, and I found that it had problems in our meeting room, which was fairly warm and humid, but it worked great in my room with the air conditioning on.
I’ll bump the thread when I give it a shot, which probably won’t be until next weekend unless I get really frustrated.