I have a Toshiba Satellite S5105 with a power problem I think is
related to heat. First my computer shut down while i was out of the
room. It was plugged into the AC adapter. Turned unit back on. Started
to boot and shut down in middle of booting. Then I noticed the AC
power LED was flashing. So I unplugged the ac power, removed and
replaced the battery pack for a full reset. Plugged AC back in, LED
still flashing. Removed power. Waited 30 minutes. Plugged AC back in,
LED not flashing. Booted up ok.
After a lot of playing around to figure out the problem I found out a
couple of things that make me think the PC is not properly sensing
heat/temperature but the fan is indeed working.
Installed a utility called Sandra which shows many things, along with
CPU temp.
When my laptop has these problems it is way too hot.
Power LED flashing seems to happen at CPU tempuratures of higher than
60 deg. C.
When Power LED flashes the battery LED will either stay off or flash
on intermittently.
When CPU temp is 62-68deg C the power LED flashes intermittently.
When CPU temp is 70 deg. C the power LED flashes with a regular
on-off-on cadence.
My BIOS is the latest. Bios and other pertinent info displayed
programmatically as follows:
BIOS: 1.20
BIOS Date: 4/10/04
....
Environment Monitor: AD ADM1021A, Ver. 4.02
OS: Windows 2000 (W2K) with all the microsoft updates as of Aug. 10.
2004
Toshiba updates: I believe every driver is up to date.
Other stuff of partial interest:
I ususally always have the AC power adapter plugged in, very rarely
run on batteries.
Sometimes the fan goes on and doesn't turn off, and the laptop stays
very cool--fine with me.
I downloaded and tried the FAN.EXE program from the toshiba site
(http://www.csd.toshiba.com/cgi-bin/tais/... goto root and search for
fan.exe):
09/06/1995 09:08 AM 956 FAN.EXE
09/10/2004 10:51 AM 719 fan.zip
09/06/1995 11:06 AM 337 README.TXT
It doesn't seem to turn the fan on for me.
Issue the commands and watch the output:
FAN ON
Fan is off.
FAN OFF
Fan is off.
Program is probably too old to work correctly. Looking for something
newer...
I have 2 AC adapters.
Problem seems to happen with adapter A
Doesn't seem to happen with adapter B
Strange.
Toshiba service replace for me about 6 months ago: Motherboard, fan,
graphics card.
