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OT: Trouble with laptop

Hi All,

I am sking here after hunting the web without success. I am looking at my son's laptop which has stopped booting properly and have come across a problem I do not recollect seeing before.

Symptoms:-

The machine will boot into Vsta Home basic but ends with a blue screen and no icons. This appears to be the desktop background (NOT the BSOD). Booting in safe mode brings up the icons but these do not do anything whn cliked on by the mouse.

Thinking "VIC" (Vista is Crap), I wiped the drive, reinstalled from the recovery disk, system stalled on the "loading" scree.

Wiped the drive, installed XP - same - booted to desktop teletubby style screen with no icons. Boot to safe mode - works.

Swopped memory in and out - no difference.

Any ideas/suggestions as to the problem? Laptop is a Toshiba L30, couple of years old. ATi graphics. Intel CPU.

TIA

Reply to
no-one
Loading thread data ...

Try running diagnostics. Download and burn bootable CDs: RAM test -

formatting link
disk -
formatting link

Reply to
Paddy O'Doors

hardware somewhere. Probably bad RAM. Or its just fricking too cold?

smaller installations (safe mode) using good RAM. try and go beyond, crump!

Memtest.exe? a starting point. At least if its RAM it can be replaced.. everything else its new motherboard time on a laptop.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

Half an inch of snow and the country goes mad.

Reply to
Martin Pentreath

I don't have Vista myself, but I've encountered this problem on a friend's PC. I think there's an option that hides all the icons on the desktop, but I can't remember what you have to do to get them back. Maybe a right-click on the taskbar?

Dave W

Reply to
Dave W

Reply to
Chris Bartram

If it does turn out to be a dodgy SIM, you can clean it by rubbing a piece of normal A4 printer paper over the gold contacts. The paper is mildly abrasive and will remove any crud or oxidation that's on the contacts. Don't rub too hard as they're delicate beasties and easily proken. (that tip comes courtesy of my boss in 1976: working at EMI and trying to fix some occasionally duff test equipment).

Reply to
pete
[snip]

Well I was going to try loading Ubuntu 9 and saw disk and memory testing utils on the install options menu. Ran both (ram tester was Memtest 2.16) and it passed. Rebooted and the desktop came up !! Checked hardware devices and saw a yellow mark against the video - saidthe drivers couldn't be loaded due to corrupt files or faulty stuff. Uninstalled it and have left it with the default XP graphics drivers which appear to be working. Will let my son "flood test" it over the Chritmas holidays.

Many thanks for all the suggestions, which I have loggged for future reference. Still think it may turn out to be the graphics chip on the motherboard, but hey ho..it's working at the moment.

Best regards.

Reply to
no-one

ah. Corrupt drivers could WELL cause the issues you said you had.

That could be something as nasty as powering off in a boot cycle when they are being loaded.

You can generally download new ones from the manufacturer.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

This won't help you but when I worked in PC Support for a large organisation, diagnostics was too time consuming. PC diagnostic utilities are time consuming and rarely of any use. If you had a problem then the procedure was: Step 1. Format the hard disk and re-image with operating system and applications (or use the recovery disk). If that didn't work. Replace the hard disk and repeat step 1. If that didn't work. Replace the memory and repeat step 1. If that didn't work then replace the motherboard, effectively chuck the machine out as it's already taken too much time.

Reply to
Rednadnerb

[snip]

Please give the name of the company so we know to avoid it.

Reply to
Dave Plowman (News)

Corrupted or incorrect drivers. Use a fresh install CD and install CD, not image or recovery partition.

nVidia & ATI can be problematic, corrupted displays etc.

In general - find the forum for Toshiba and post for L30, it may be known which could save a lot of effort.

Reply to
js.b1

The company was Bloomberg but that is not significant. All large companies operate the same way.

Reply to
Rednadnerb

And they just lurve a nice unhealthy dose of static discharge while doing the above ...

Reply to
Adrian C
[snip]

Many thanks for all the suggestions. Finally solved (fingers crossed), it was a defective hard drive. Swopped in a replacement and used the recovery CD and all appears fine.

Seasons greetings to all.

Reply to
no-one

And a right pain it is too. No-one would suggest demolishing and rebuilding a house if a lightbulb blows so why is a similarly drastic solution often proposed for software issues?

Reply to
Mark

It's standard for any large organisation. It really does take too long diagnosing stuff. Nearly everybody is on a fairly standard install, and they have been told not to store anything on the local hard disk, so a reimage isn't as painful as it would be for a typical home user. Still quite painful though...

(and yes, one can blame microsoft for a large portion of this).

Reply to
Clive George

Its what I do if all else fails on this desktop.

No data on it to speak of. Just icons and stuff. Everything is on the server.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

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