Hi,

I have a toshiba laptop Satellite Pro 4290 (S3 Savage IX/MX chipset) and
have a very strange symptom. When I work in graphics mode (windows, linux -
Xserver) everything is all right. I may work this way for 5 hours and
nothing happen. But when I switch laptop to ms-dos mode (booting from floppy
for example) and run scandisk program (blue color) and something wrong
happen. After 1 or 2 minutes on LCD display appears something strange -
vertical change of color, especially visible on blue color - one vertical
line is dark blue and next is "normal" blue and so on. After that when I run
windows system this image distorsion is all the time. I must turn laptop off
and wait 10 minutes to have again good image on lcd display but only in
windows or linux Xserver. And again I may work in graphics mode for few
hours and everything is good on the screen. But when I switch to ms-dos (or
linux console) the same situation do again.

What may it be?

Mirko

What OS?

I have a 4270ZDVD and always had video driver problems (running Win98SE) .
There were various symptoms, like the bottom "tails" of text being cut off,
rainbow-like swatches of colour appearing in photo editing programs, and
other weird behaviour. The Toshiba drivers were much more limited than the
S3 drivers, but their customization included the dual controller mode, which
allows running the laptop screen and TV-out simultaneously. I do this to use
the TV as a second monitor (works, but pretty poor quality). When I
installed XP, the native drivers that got installed were the best yet, and
that's what I'm on today.

So, I would first check the Toshiba site for the most current drivers. If
that doesn't help, you might try going to the S3 site
(http://www.s3graphics.com/DRVVIEW.HTM) and getting the latest from there.
If you are unsure of your exact video chipset, there is a utility on that
page that you can download and run to identify it. If you do decide to try
some native S3 drivers, and need to "Toshiba-ize" them, post back and I can
let you know what I did (involves copying a module from the old
installation).

Good luck....Randy

"TPI" <mirco@poczta.fm> wrote in message
news:bkh6vs$hv2$1@atlantis.news.tpi.pl...

Randy S. wrote:
DOS, Windows98SE and Linux (debian).


After few days of testing my laptop I have a following conclusions:
In DOS and during linux instalation in text mode an image on LCD display
is bad (after 1 or 2 minutes I see tails on image). In Windows, Debian
X-server and in console mode in debian linux everything is OK. But for
example in Red Hat 9.0 X-server and console mode the image is the same
way disrtored like in DOS system. Everything have pointed out that for
everything is responsible graphics chip driver. DOS don't have any
graphics driver and I think that that is the culprit of all that situation.

Mirko