Beat me to it, EE.

It looks like the HDD is behind the optical drive when looking at the front of the computer (on the left side) It seems to be held in place by a single small (#0 is about right) Phillips screw. The screw is on the bottom of the machine. The whole assembly should pull out and then you can find the screws that hold it into the plastic housing/sled. Not sure if the memory cover needs to be pulled free or not.

I did find some tech forum discussion of the problem you report, OH, but haven't had time to research the answers. Most things point to a video problem. either card or LCD.

Mark

I will never 'get' this. I will not be able to figure this out. You are all talking greek. (or geek) And I'm not stupid!

Mark, I also googled my way to some discussion boards..one on the Toshiba support forum. Some people recommended removing the battery?

I don't see where that would do any good. My google-fu showed me that model Toshiba has issues with the power supply, specifically where it connects into the chassis. A lot of people have cracked their boxes open and resoldered the connections. You mentioned that the power was flaky so this is consistent.

The internal disk drive is mounted in a "sled" - basically a plastic housing that holds the disk drive in place. If you open the laptop so the screen is facing you, the CD drive should be on one side. Behind that - closer to you - should be a little access panel with one screw holding it shut. Take the screw out, using a small phillips screwdriver, and then with a small flat blade screwdriver gently pry the sled out.

Tsk Tsk Don't be discouraged, we are no smarter than you. you forgot the first rule of tech knoweldge. None of us are supposed to be touching this stuff anyways and we are all in over our heads. When all else fails, read the distructions ahem, instructions.


1.Print out way more than you need for instuctions.
2.Buy tools that you will only use once and will be lost
3.Find a spot with a lot of room to do the project in.
4.Start the project just before you have to go out for an appointment, or to work, school etc.
5.Lay out the parts in reverse order as you remove them so the cat will know how to re-arrange them when you leave it half done to go to the appointment.
6. take pictures with your camera if you really need to as you disassemble.

But most of all remember that it was built by a human being, (or his R2D2 freind)and there is probably a way to fix it. You can do this, even if you have to take a coffee break and get a rubdown between removing screws. If you crack some plastic or lose a screw there is allways superglue,JB-weld and duct tape.
Heck its a paperweight now. The worse you can do is finish breaking it. then you will have been thorough

Mark thanks for the advice, I am going to have DS read this thread. He will tottally get it and it follows what my philosphy was also.
He does want to mix and he does want to do video editing/recording. His church is working with him and they are setting up a reaally leer stage for them.
The advice coming from a sound man will be invaluable to him.

Some observations about electronics:

The key to electronic repair is to approach the device with confidence thus scaring it into thinking that you know what you are doing. If it senses your fear, it will not react as you expect it to.

When I get something in for repair, the first thing I do is to threaten it with my screw drivers. If it is stubborn I will turn on the soldering iron and crank it up to 900 degrees F. If I actually have to use the soldering iron, it will usually do the trick, but if not, I also have a large hammer on my workbench. If I need to use that, BTW, you probably needed a new one anyway. I will sometimes use my service monitor to make annoying noises, chirps, and buzzes in an effort to annoy the perp into cooperating.



Every electronic circuit must by it's very nature contain one part that is obsolete, two that are unavailable and three that are still under development.

Any product that contains electronic components will be updated before ever leaving the factory to reflect the current state of the art. None of these changes will be mentioned in the service manual.



Only after removing the last of the 14 hold down screws securing the access panel will it be discovered that you are looking at the wrong access panel.

Only after tightening the last of the 14 hold down screws to re-secure the access panel will you find the gasket laying on the floor where you laid the panel before you figured out it was the wrong one.

When it comes to consumer electronics, variables don't and constants aren't, unless you count change which is always constant.



There is a logical progression to every problem, from bad to worse.

This process is cyclical.



Nothing is ever so screwed up you can't make the problem worse, but seldom does a problem fix itself...Unless your name is Bill Gates, then it is a way of life.




At our shop we do three kinds of work: Good, Fast and Cheap. You get to pick a maximum of two for anything you need done. If it's good and fast, it isn't going to be cheap. If it's good and cheap, it could take quite a while before you get it back and if it's fast and cheap, I make no warranty, either expressed or implied as to its fitness for use for the job for which it was designed.



If it ain't broke, you can't fix it, but that doesn't mean you can't do a routine tune and align procedure and charge the customer minimum labor. Somebody has to pay for the screw drivers, soldering iron and hammer on my workbench...

And the over twenty years of experience that I have figuring out what you were doing wrong and educating you as to the proper way to use your device so that you will buy what you really need, hopefully from me.

Well, now the lights are flashing and the device is making these purring sounds and all seems to be well again. I do hope that is what the thing was supposed to do.

At any rate, that's what it does now.

Mark

ITA mark
and as we all know
Labor has a set price.

If the customer watches while the work is being done.. its more $

If the customer helps with the labor, its double the original price.

SSO,

And if you work on it before you bring ii to me, it's triple the price.

A friend of mine had a sign up in his automotive shop many years ago...

Labor Rate: $50.00 per Hour
If you watch: $75.00 per Hour
If you help: $100.00 per Hour
If you work on it before bringing it to me: You don't want to know. Just fix it yourself.

Another friend who ran a rather upscale car shop had a customer who came in because the brakes on his Porche were making a funny noise. The mechanics found some kind of cheat, as in about $14.00 version, brake pads on the car. He called the guy to tell him what he found and heard, "The guy on Ebay said they were just as good as OEMs. Otherwise I wouldn't have bothered putting them on last weekend."

The next question was a killer, "You don't know anyone who'd like to buy them from me, do you?"

My buddy said he charged the guy an extra 50 bucks just because he was an idiot.

Mark

I routinely post this in any computer lab that I work in. We frequently get mid-level tourists who were technically savvy 20 years ago and think they are still current, even if the most technical thing they've done recently is to install a firefox plug-in.

For best effect, print up in German gothic lettering.

ACHTUNG!

ALLES TURISTEN UND NONTEKNISCHEN LOOKENPEEPERS!

DAS KOMPUTERMASCHINE IST NICHT F�R DER GEFINGERPOKEN UND
MITTENGRABEN! ODERWISE IST EASY TO SCHNAPPEN DER
SPRINGENWERK, BLOWENFUSEN UND POPPENCORKEN MIT
SPITZENSPARKSEN.

IST NICHT F�R GEWERKEN BEI DUMMKOPFEN. DER RUBBERNECKEN
SIGHTSEEREN KEEPEN DAS COTTONPICKEN H�NDER IN DAS POCKETS
MUSS.

ZO RELAXEN UND WATSCHEN DER BLINKENLICHTEN.

I acually saw that sign originally in an auto shop in Phoenix AZ. 1987 When I was living there lol

I like it


Talking about how fast PC tech stuff has grown

I was working in AT&T as a direct temp in 1988. At the time they were hiring two technicians on the east coast and I scored high so I got a job. The biggest and baddest computer at the time was iI believe a 3B2. Thetop of the line PC was a 486DX. WEll to load the operating system for the 3B2 you had to spend a hour at least installing the 8 51/4 inch floppys. Thats like 2,880 kbs.

You were real special if you had a terminal at home that you could dial into the PC so you could work on projects on Unix. The teacher at bell labs was talking about the new 32 bit operating system that was going to come out in the future and we had a version of windows, well windows that were green anyways.



I ask my kids now about PC stuff like software compatability and plugins. They know more than I do about a lot of it. I just know how to go slow and easy.

SSO,

So you're a Unix person, huh?

You might understand this.

A friend of mine who once worked at this large, partially federally funded impressive research facility (they sort of work with X-rays and were important enough that at the time they had a Cray-2 aka: Bubbles)...and I went to his place of employment one Saturday afternoon with a box of microphones, a smaller audio mixer and a tape deck. We spent three hours trying to get just the right mix on a recording of a tankless toilet flushing in the restroom, with the sound echoing off the walls and the whole deal.

When we got it just right, we captured it and created this little 3 1/2 second file (extension .AU) with the name "FLUSH" and of course associated it with the appropriate command on his entire work-group.

The first one to provoke the file into action was his boss who had a scientist from Ukraine in his office at the moment time.

About once per year or so one of us will send the other that file by email, just for giggles.

Oh, his machine's name on the network was "Elvis."

Mark

Cray huh? wowsers. well I remember the flush command but its been 20 years since I used unix. LOL My boss put a password on Root becuase he was afraid I would log in and type r *.* > I liked to login as root rofl. Heck I installed the dang thing.

Thats a funny story Mark. Tell me were you one of the kids in school who charged up the capacitors and put them on the teachers desk too?

Freakin Elvis

I've been in the Unix world since 1983.

Sun OS came with it's own flush.au and back in 1992 we had fun with it as part of various things we were doing on our SPARCstation2.

We also wrote a cuckoo clock daemon and it just happened to be 11AM when some general came to visit and he was greeted to 11 cuckoos.

We had a lot of pranking in the office since many of us knew the root password. Folks would have their .profile or .cshrc/.login files modified to make it look like their files were all gone and commands wouldn't work, etc.

Nothing like making someone's login shell a shell script that didn't let them do much of anything

Later, I taught Solaris and I had one student who would rcp sound files to /dev/audio of remote machines. He was obviously bored and thought that was funny, not to mention remotely shutting down other folks machines.

So I simply changed all of his "r" commands, as well as ftp and telnet to immediately power off his machine when he tried to access the machines of others on the network.

He quickly figured it out and played nicely the rest of the week.

Do you remember the prank program "April" or the MSDOS gag, "RUDEDOS?"

WE used to put those in folks machines to run at boot-up then delete themselves and restore the original boot files from backups at completion.

Mark

SSO,

When I was in school I didn't even take electronics. I took math and physics and English, a year of chemistry and one of biology.

Electronics was my hobby...

Along with photography, cars (drag raced a little), a bit of wood working, guitar (played in a couple of bands), audio/music, Euchre and girls. I sang in the choir at church, taught Sunday school, ran the mixer for the local radio station at the church, did PE type activities with a Headstart class of underprivileged kids, studied the bible and learned koine Greek. I read stuff...Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard...Asimov, Bradbury...Walter Martin, J. Vernon McGee...


I didn't even work in electronics (unless you count sales of audio/TV and car audio installation) until 1984, and then I was in QA. I've been in current job for just short of 20 years. I began in field service, moved into bench work and then added sales back into the mix.

Mark

So this is where all the cool peeps are hiding...

Yup. They knew the rest of us even COOLER peeps are too afraid to step foot in here.