Portability At Last! Part 3

Next, I got a new laptop to replace the Acer. This part will have a slight overlap with the next series of posts I will write by a tiny bit. I had done a trade with another friend for an iPAQ. There was an extended warranty on it, and to reduce the overlap, I will make a long story short. They couldn't fix it, so I got it back and a 400 dollar gift card. I took the gift card up to Circuit City and picked up a VERY nice Toshiba A205-S5859.

From A205

This laptop was normally 850 dollars, and it was on sale for 600 dollars. This means that with the 400 dollar gift card, the laptop had only cost me 200 dollars without tax. I got a free router with it which my friend bought for 40 bucks so that had paid for the tax. This was a great day for me and I was very happy.

Now, this laptop had a 250GB hard drive, Centrino Core 2 Duo T5550 running at 1.83GHZ, and 2GB of RAM. One of the flaws had been that it ran Vista. It was the standard 15.4" screen at 1280x800. The laptop had been great and I even got an extended 9 cell battery and a second adapter for it. I had thought that since this laptop wasn't made by Acer, it would last me for many years.

I had a weird issue with the screen on the laptop though. I had sent it into Toshiba, and within a week, I had the laptop back with a brand new screen. There was a strange line in the lower right corner of the screen. It had been very thin since it went through the middle of the pixels, and if I had to guess, it was probably an eye lash that had made its way into the panel during assembly.

Well, at that time, I had just thought that it was a random accident and I just got a bad screen. Sadly this wasn't the case, and I am not really sure that I can fault Toshiba for this. One day, I had seen that the screen on my Toshiba had a very strange looking mark around the edges of the screen. I tried to clean it many times, but it wasn't on the outside of the screen. This was inside the screen and thus unfixable unless I was willing to get a new screen.

Of course, you know where this story is going, as that wasn't the only problem. Under the touchpad, there was something getting very hot, enough to make the hard drive hit critical temperatures. My first thought was that the hard drive was going bad, and it would be a simple fix. It wasn't the hard drive though; of course it can never be something so simple. Silly me for even thinking that it could be simple.

Now, here is where the weirdness starts. I had left the laptop sitting on my desk for a months, and I had put the battery back in and when I went to use it, I had the strangest problems yet. The computer would pass the power on system test, but it wouldn't boot Windows. Somehow, unknown to me even know, I had gotten it to work. What do you think I am going to say next?

If you said it had another problem, then you are right. Now, after all these problems, what would be able to make it all worse? The audio of course! This was a weird problem in itself as well. The right speaker had been making a clicking noise, about once a second, and would continue with headphones plugged in as well. The audio was also distorted, on speakers as well as the headphone jack. This problem, taking the hot spot with it at the same time, just vanished as randomly as it had come.

Well, now that everything is fixed, maybe I should play with the laptop a bit. That was the plan after all was it not? The laptop was running slow, but I did to the upgrade form Vista to 7 to try and make sure it wasn't a software problem, so I assumed that was it, and maybe it was for all I know. This is where the last problem appeared before I decided to give up and put the Toshiba in the attic with the Acer.

One day, I put the laptop in sleep mode, like I always did, by closing the lid. I looked at the laptop a little later on, and noticed that it wasn't even on anymore. Now, this happened at random, and since it seemed to be something that I couldn't really duplicate, I figured that it was better off just giving up on it.