I picked the toshiba up on Monday and it was nice to have it back. It seems to be behaving itself so far this week - I guess the real test will be when I use it on Sunday for powerpoint presentations again. (incidentally Ian, I tried openoffice last night and it didn't muck up the layout of the powerpoint presentation but it didn't launch hyperlinked ppt files in slideshow mode - more on that later after I've had a chance to play with it a bit more.)
Recently in Toshiba Category
I got a text message from the office this afternoon - apparently the toshiba is back from the repair shop again, and typically today is the day I'm meant to be in the office but am not. I'm at home sick today with a cold - I spent about 4 hours yesterday on the motorway sneezing every 5 minutes which is not much fun. Anyway, hopefully the laptop will work properly for more than 1 week as its been about a month since it first went back to the repair shop.
This time the toshiba is back from repair (after two weeks) and the screen looks like it is fixed, as is the catch on the laptop. Now however the keyboard is shortcircuited/broken. When I press the 7 key, sometimes it works - sometimes it doesn't. Pressing the o key always gives me op and pressing m gives me m.
NOT very helpful. Thankfully my password contains none of those characters as it would have taken me forever to work out why I couldn't log onto the pc.
This time I'm going to try and presuade them to fix it onsite as its been away for 3.5 weeks since sept 24th. Blogging each episode has certainly helped in tracking down the dates and times.
Update They don't do onsite fixes as they don't have any engineers so it would need to be sent back again. However they said that it sounded like the keyboard wasn't seated properly so I pulled out the retaining clip, pushed on the keyboard, put the clip back in again and it now works. I rang to cancel the courier - had to leave a voicemail message as they didn't answer the phone, and an hour later a courier arrives to pick it up!
update2 Typical - it's failed again with the keyboard an hour later so they'll be picking it up tomorrow
...."and we can mend it for you if you like for £15" was the conversation I had with Toshiba this afternoon.
My response was "I'm glad you said that as you charged me for this fix last time it was with you 2 weeks ago and you've obviously not fixed it correctly!"
Hopefully this means that they'll fix the latch properly - all they did last time was add the latch to the laptop but not actually put the spring back into the locking mechanism.
The laptop has started failing to boot and switching itself off. Unfortunately last night it did it in the middle of a powerpoint show of the hymns at church. Just as people started to sing the laptop switched itself off, the preacher got blinded with a blue light from the projector and all panic ensued (from the powerpoint man)
The Toshiba is back now and not displaying any bootup problems as mentioned previously. Interestingly the current time on the laptop is 3.42pm on Saturday 8th January 2000. I guess this means they are likely to have replaced the motherboard/battery in the laptop. Although I had undone some screws to have a look at the problem myself as per the previous google search for toshiba booting problems, I was not able to take the machine apart as they suggested.
However when the laptop came back the sticker that said "warrenty void if removed" now says "void" and it has been removed, and underneath is a screw - probably the one stopping me taking it apart.
After my booting problems post on Friday I rang the support line number for Toshiba this morning on 0870 444 8936, started off by saying "I have a problem which from the web seems to be a known problem" and then proceeded to tell them serial numbers etc. The guy agreed it was a known problem, gave me a call ref and then told me to ring 0870 787 1807 to go through the procedure again. I did this and they're coming to collect the laptop today and it should be returned to me in 5-6 working days, free of charge as its a known issue, despite the machine being out of warrenty. Now thats good customer service.
Not sure how I'm going to cope without a laptop for a week - my desktop machine in the office is a 600MHz machine so its going to take a long time to do any work.
Update Even the courier who has just arrived to pick up the laptop said he knew what the problem was when the call came in!
I've been having some weird problems with the Toshiba laptop recently. In the past couple of weeks it has been refusing to switch on, with just the 1st and the 3rd led lighting up (the latter flashing). The solution has tended to be to unplug everything, remove the power and the battery, plug the mains in, let the machine boot and then plug the battery back in again. It seems to be more unreliable when the cooler, network,modem and power cables are plugged in before I switch the machine on so yesterday I booted without the cooler running. By the end of the day I could feel the underside of the threequarter inch thick wooden desk was warm - and wood is not meant to be a good conductor! Just shows how hot these laptops get. Anyway, on Sunday, when I was meant to use the laptop for a powerpoint presentation at church the machine wouldn't boot and I just could not get it to work by any of the previous tricks mentioned. In the end I had to use another laptop that we fortunately had with us. The weird thing was that when I switched it on later when I got home it worked first time. I wonder if the laptop has nerves.......
Update<hmmmm - interesting. The first post on google for a search containing toshiba 6100 manual contains a description of the problem that I'm having - toshiba 6100 wont turn on and provides a solution - turns out that it is likely to be a loose video card. Guess I'll have to dig out those minature screw drivers.
Lucky me - the Tosh laptop has started to not complete the log in process. The desktop appears and looks ok, but hovering over the taskbar/start button the mouse cursor turns into an hour glass. Trying to log out then pops up with tmeejm_wnd not responding which the google search returns several results, all of which come to the conclusion that its a toshiba problem and to ask them but no-one ever posted back an answer. Fro m what I can tell, this software is something to do with ejecting the laptop from a docking station. (incidentally I then find that nvidia twinview window also comes up as not responding afterwards). Logging on as another user solves the problem so it could be a corrupt profile (hope not!)
Update After 10 minutes on hold with Toshiba I'm told to stick the recovery cd in and reinstall the machine - I don't think so! They also gave me a phone number of 0871 277 0808 to ring for support. Spoke to a helpful tech who said that they did have one hit in their database for this but he couldn't access this at the time but will email me with more information.
What I have discovered is that their is an uninstall.isu file in c:\program files\toshiba\tme3 so I might just run that later.......
The laptop arrived this afternoon, 10 minutes after the hard disk for the server arrived. The mouse seems to be working ok, I guess time will tell if they actually fixed it (the screen is fingerprint-smudge-less so I know they did something.) They didn't format the hard disk which is a relief and everything looks good. I've even got a sticker to prove I'm virus free :-)
As mentioned in the previous post, I had to return my Toshiba laptop for repair yesterday. The mouse has been going haywire and after being told to install the mouse drivers from the Recovery CD (of all the weird places to put drivers - personally I would have put them on the Utility and Drivers CD) and not finding it on either of the supplied cd's I rang back up and was told they would come and collect it. Didn't bother telling me how long it would be before I'd get it back though (and I didn't want to depress myself by asking). Their website says that its a hardware fault so fortunately there was no arguing needed to persuade them to fix it. Shame there was no on-site warrenty purchased though.
Incidentally the nipple mouse is more politically referred to as an Accupoint mouse.
The Toshiba Satellite Pro, 6100 only has a few pre-defined boot order sequences.If I want to have the option to boot from CD but don't necessarily have a bootable cd in the drive, it will insist on also trying to boot via the lan (which is VERY unlikely to work as I don't have any boot servers at home or at work so I have to wait for the timeout or press any key. OR I can boot from hard disk all the time and go into the bios if I ever want to boot from cd which is a right pain in the neck. However, the online help says pressing F12 will give me a boot menu (it doesn't) or pressing C will boot from the CD (it doesn't). BUT if I press F12 AND C - it boots from CD! And I was meant to work that one out for myself??????Update Actually I've found out that pressing the C key until the icons appear and then letting go will boot from CD, likewise pressing F12 until the icons appear and letting go will allow me to navigate through the icons.
