Let’s talk about problems typical for Toshiba Satellite A60 and A65 notebooks. Do you own one of these laptops? Is it working fine for you?
Here are some typical issues I’ve notices with this model.
1. First of all – overheating
Does your laptop shuts down without any reason when you ran CPU intensive programs? If yes, then most likely it happens because the laptop overheats. It happens because overtime the heatsink gets clogged with dust. A layer of dust collects between the cooling fan and the heat sink (dashed line on the picture) and heat produces by the processor gets trapped inside the laptop. As a result of that, the processor overheats and the laptop shuts down.
There are two different way to clean the heat sink and fan in these models:
- Buy a can of compressed air or find an air compressor and blow off the heat sink through the air intakes on the bottom of the laptop.
- Remove the keyboard (steps 5-9) and you’ll get an access to the cooling fan. Blow off dust from the fan and the heat sink.
In some cases the laptop overheats because of defective cooling fan. The fan should start working as soon as you power up the laptop. If the fan will not star, most likely it’s bad and must be replaced. You can find a new heat sink cooling fan for Satellite A60 and A65 notebooks by the following part number: V000042110.
2. Defective onboard memory
Here’s another common problem – bad onboard memory. This memory is integrated into the motherboard and if it goes bad you’ll have to replace the entire motherboard.
If your laptop starts with some weird characters or lines of dots on the screen, most likely you have a faulty onboard memory. If you test the laptop with an external monitor, you’ll see the same defective video on the external monitor too. You can test the onboard memory with Memtest86+ utility. Remove any external RAM modules and run the memory test. If the onboard memory fails, you’ll have to replace the motherboard.
The integrated memory module is located close by the memory extension slot, under the foil.
UPDATE: If you have bad memory, you should read comment 93 submitted by Daniel on September 28th, 2007.
3. Last but not least – power jack issue.
With Satellite A60 and A65 notebooks this problem is not as common as with Satellite M30X, M35X, A70 and A75, but it’s still a problem. Overtime, the power jack might get loose and the positive pin stops making a good contact with the motherboard anymore. As a result, the laptop switches to the battery power even though the power adapter is still plugged in. Usually you can temporally fix the problem by adjusting the power adapter plug on the back of the laptop, but after some time the problem reappears.
In this case you’ll have to disassemble the laptop, remove the motherboard and resolder the power jack. I’m buying new power jacks here.
Do you experience the same problems or you have another issue with your Satellite A60 or A65 notebook? Please share your experience.
Instructions for replacing laptop power jack yourself
If you find this article useful, please consider making a donation to the author. Thank you!
April 4th, 2008 at 10:10 pm
I can’t stop playing with this thing. I thought I’d try something…I pulled out my hard drive and with the recovery disc in the computer, I turned it on. It went through the preliminary stuff and then zoomed on through to the point where it was asking me if i wanted to wipe the disc clean or just do a restore….way past where it goes with the HDD installed….as a test, I reinstalled the HDD, turned it back on and I get the BSOD as soon as it gets past the preliminary tests.
I gotta call my son tomorrow and see if he has a HDD kicking around and see if I can get this thing to work with his drive…otherwise I might take a chance and order one from newegg…if it doesn’t fix the problem, i can always return it, I guess.
April 4th, 2008 at 5:15 pm
One other thing that I’m not sure of (I wrote the tome in #177)…if I remove my 1 gig stick, do I “disable” level 2 cache in bios? I guess my question is, Is level 2 Cache the same thing as my 1 gig ram? I can fix sound equipment all day but some of the inner workings of these computer boxes flummox me
I also forgot to mention in the last post that I just got done completely disassembling this computer hoping I’d find a loose connection or something else obvious…no dice…reassembled it and same problem…is it possible that I’m dealing with a bad hard disc?
Is it possible to force this computer into DOS somehow so I can perform some sort of chkdsk without having to boot into windows?
April 4th, 2008 at 5:05 pm
Here’s a strange one…I bought my daughter this computer (A65) several years ago when she entered college. She started getting the “shutdowns”. Cleaned out masses of dust and it worked for her for quite a while longer. Then she started getting blue screens. Reloaded recovery and it worked fine for a few months longer.
Now it doesn’t boot up at all unless I’m running memtest 2.01. I removed the mem stick and memtest runs fine, no failures…it’ll run all night like this.
If I try to boot computer from HDD is always goes to safe mode and I can’t go beyond that.
If I try to load recovery disc it boots up OK (from CD), does the preliminary install stuff and then goes to a blue screen that says in effect “A problem has been detected…..
Technical information:
STOP: 0×000000024 (0×001902FA, 0xFAFBF80C, 0xFAFBF50C, 0xFA871BBA)
ntfs.sys – Address FA871BBA base at FA865000, Datestamp 3d6de5c1
I don’t know if that will help at all to all you super techies.
One more thing, if I try to boot from HDD and start from “Safe Mode” it always stops partway through loading drivers\atisgkaf.sys and then stays there for a second or two and then flashes a blue screen too fast for me to read and then goes to “Safe Mode” screen again.
Any ideas? suggestions? I’m assuming that I’m not dealing with on board memory probs as it passes memtest, right?
April 3rd, 2008 at 12:10 pm
Hi, i was wondering where i can find the cmos battery for my toshiba satellite a65-s1065, i’ve looked on numerous websites with no luck, it would be much appreciated if i can get at least some input
many thanks
March 31st, 2008 at 2:50 pm
Just like comment 165, I tried emoving all 8 memory chips on the mother board and all I get is a high pitched beep for about 3 seconds .and then the machine shuts off. I am attempting to use solder wick tomorrow to remove all traces of solder …. but I am not optomistic. I will post back again if this works.
March 28th, 2008 at 4:31 pm
yep, it’s sad but true…..
Stripping this machine down as justin sez and removing the onboard memory………..works!!
Bad design or dusty environment…Bad design.
Toshiba..Bow your head in shame………………..
Justin take a Bow……………………………………….
Timberlake is unplayable without this solution.
March 27th, 2008 at 11:45 pm
I am an a65 user an a i have the 3 problems.
1 the duft is the most common an easy solved problem
2 the jack problem is the less common but i solved re soldering
3 the memory problem i am currently whit just 96 good ram an 123 when shows problems and its passable
my recommendation its that first of all determine where the problem comes, following my steps first check the dust then check the power jack if its not turned on with out battery and only the cable connect or the power led does not illuminate completely, then you go by a power jack failure. but if you tried the previous steeps and when you go to the bios menu show you that the amount of memory its less than 256 then you got a memory failure that its hardly difficult to get out unless you go to quit the on board memory with extreme precaution recommendation go to one professional to do it for your self if you do not how to do an explained what to do and show him this page. other way try it your self and good luck i am go and try another trick that its re flow the memory on my mainboard to check first which module its truly damaged before remove all of them and try to save some on board memory for my video card and use the full extra memory for the operating system
another point to make its that please every one that had done the memory remove please take high resolution pictures of their works i do not mind if their work its not beauty enough but it could help to make a good reference guide for every one that gone by these problem and help other on how to do it properly, check out the ati amd page for the video card of these equipment because it has a section to see the memory types, models and combinations that can be made with the a65 main board and the toshiba page were you can get the more specific and detailed information for some of these modules i currently have one pdf with the configuration for the toshiba model of memory but i am not sure if these its the one i got installed on my board so when the moment of truth comes i going to post it here to help the a65 community, so i hope can help me make a good guide for every one
my email its alexander_eltu@hotmail.com
and i am from méxico
March 27th, 2008 at 2:46 am
CJ,
I have an interesting heating/cooling problem. I cleaned out my A65 fan using your excellent pictorial guide. While in there, I upgraded my CPU from the Celeron to the Pentium (same clock speed). I replaced the thermal grease, reconnected everything, and fired te old girl up. The system ran great for about five minutes, then shut down, presumably due to overheating. I could not restart with the power button (system would begin to power up and would shut down in a few seconds). Hm. I re-opened the case up and checked out my work to make sure all was well. No problems. After all was reassembed, I tried it again. Sure enough, the fan started spinning at power up, then stopped. After a few minutes, the system shut down due to overheating. I checked the BIOS settings to make sure I didn’t have something weird there, and confirmed that the settings were to maximize CPU performance (rather tan optimize battery). I could not find any other settings relavant to the cooling fan, so I back to the drawing board. At this point, I began to suspect that I somehow managed to dorkle up (technical term) my fan when I was working on the CPU swap. I powered the system up, and lo and behold! It worked great! The next day, I was back to overheating again… ??? I discovered that when cold starting my lappy, the fan spins up at power on then shuts down. The system will run until thermal shutdown due to overheating. However, if I restart the system while it is still warm (not waiting for the thermal safety shutdown) then the fan will spin up at start, shut down, and then (drum roll please…) will spin back up to cool the system as necessary during operation. Using this two boot method, my system runs just fine (I ran 3DMark01 in an endless loop for three days to verify). What could cause this weird annoyance? Is there a way for me to bypass the fan controller and hardwire it to the on position?
Thanks,
Scott
March 26th, 2008 at 9:08 pm
Fili,
If the BIOS got screwed during the upgrade you’ll have to replace the motherboard.
March 26th, 2008 at 4:26 am
Hi everybody,
I gave a a 65 toshiba satellite S1070, tried to update bios(what a mistake), mashine froze…so I swicted it off.It never come back to life.
Looking at this webpage I found out the Power Jack might be the cause(already was very bady damaged).My question is how much should I pay to replace the Power Jack?Or is the Bios the cause?
Thanks for any help
Fili