Toshiba Satellite A60 and A65 problems
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
Entry Filed under: Toshiba Laptop Problems
264 Responses to “Toshiba Satellite A60 and A65 problems”
Pages: « 27 … 11 10 9 8 7 [6] 5 4 3 2 1 » Show All
Pages: « 27 … 11 10 9 8 7 [6] 5 4 3 2 1 » Show All
July 13th, 2007 at 4:34 am
Hi,
I’m thinking of upgrading my CPU (A60 now is Celeron, 128kb cache). Is this possible, cheap, effective?
Thanks
July 11th, 2007 at 9:30 pm
Gail,
Looks like some files were deleted or corrupted and there is not much you can do to fix the problem.
Probably it is possible to restore the registry or revert the operating system back to working condition using third party software, for example ERD Commander, but most end-users do not have this kind of software.
Most likely you’ll have to backup all personal files and after that run the recovery DVD - it will reload everything back to original factory defaults.
July 11th, 2007 at 7:19 am
Toshiba A65 S126…wireless NEVER worked on this. Finally, I went to Toshiba’s help/support (after Circuit City wouldn’t help and, made it worse and slower…even though it still has one more year on Service Warranty). I found a download and that seemed to fix it. Then, I plugged in a new Microsoft wireless optical notebook mouse. Although it recognized new hardware, it never configured it through the Wizard. I decided to remove AOL thinking this was causing everything to be so slow. When I went to restart…OH NO!!! Got Windows first page THEN lasse.exe (0xc0000006) Application Failure Click to end. Then the Black screen. can’t find anything to explain this. Tried F8 through every choice…nothing. Any help?
July 5th, 2007 at 12:00 am
tilkan,
Make sure the cooling fan spins. It’s possible you have a bad fan and the laptop overheats. I believe the fan should start working as soon as you turn on the laptop.
July 4th, 2007 at 11:58 pm
rizwan,
You can access these screws if you remove the CD/DVD drive as it shown on the step 4.
July 4th, 2007 at 5:48 pm
I also have a problem with my Toshiba Laptop satellite A60. I could not find the solution. I has worked so well since 2004.but recently,It always shutdown after 5 or 10 minutes. (some times one hour).
I read through all above-mentioned methods to solve the problem. I cleaned, reinstalled the system many times. nothing happened.
Any help willbe appreciated.
best
Toshiba Damm
June 26th, 2007 at 1:59 pm
hi.I have got toshiba satellite A60 laptop. I tried to open back cover of my laptop.but i couldnt because there is are 3 hidden screws near by cd/dvd drive but i couldn’t found it.So could you tell me that how can i open it?
Thank you
June 19th, 2007 at 6:24 pm
Thanks fellas. I wish only some fo my memory was bad but after running memtest it looks like everythings gotta go. I’ll sit down later this week and get the onboard memory out, im not lookin to have it working perfectly, i just want my buddy to be able to do word processing and whatnot on it for classes
June 18th, 2007 at 11:31 pm
ALTERNATIVE JUSTIN’S REPAIR. I was tempted to try the repair proposed by Justin (to unsold the on board memory ram). Nevertheless I realized that only one half of the memory RAM was damaged (the errors detected by memtest were always above 127 Mb ). So, I solve the problem by simply changing the file “boot.ini” with msconfig. In the section [operating system], i added the following: /maxmem=127.
Even more: i installed a memory 256 Mb SoDIMM in the memory extension slot, I changed the boot.ini (/maxmem 383), and the laptop works perfectly!
For a Linux booting I added the command “mem=383″ to the kernel line.
June 18th, 2007 at 7:24 pm
my method works- the only drawback is there is only one memory module slot after the repair- but hey saved me from buying a new motherboard- by the way- mine was an A65 and it had the classic symptom with lines from top to bottom on the toshiba logo and would never install windows- acpi bios problem