Toshiba Satellite wont turn on

M

messhof

New Member
I have a toshiba satellite p25- the big 17" one. It's a little over 2 years old. It's been working fine, but after leaving it in the car for 4 days on a cross country road trip, it wont turn on. If you press the ower button, the computer makes a faint click, but nothing else happens. It makes the same noise when you first plug in the charger, and it also flashes one of the charging/power lights for a split second.

I've tried removing the battery and pluging it in, but it does the same thing. I took it to the Best Buy repair counter, and all they could do was check out the power cable (it works). The guy there said it was probably the motherboard, since it was getting power, as evidenced by the light.

I think motherboards for this particular machine are around $300, and the only place around here is an hour away, and they estimated it costing $500 if it was the motherboard.

Is there anything else I can do? Have other people had the same problem? If it I can determine that it is the motherboard without sending it to the shop, then I could sell it on ebay and save myself the $100+ on sending it to the shop (I don't have a car). I feel like $500 might not be worth it for a laptop this old, although it did run well and has a nice screen.

Any thoughts are welcome. Thanks.
 
Hmm could be as simple as something got jarred loose in the car ride. Have you tried resetting it? Take the battery out and make sure its not plugged in and hold the pwoer button down for like 10 seconds and then try putting it all back togethor on ac power and turn it on. If that doesnt work look for a reset button on your computer on the bottom and try that. Also try taking the hdd out and seeing if it will boot. If it doesnt try taking the memory out one at a time and reseating them. It could be a multitude of things just start at step one and maybe we can work through it and hope its not the mobo
 
Laptops can hold their value pretty good. Should you need to sell it, part it out. The LCD alone could bring in $100+ if someone really needs one!

But yeah, it's probably motherboard related, possibly inside power components(which I guess is also motherboard in laptops)

Do you know if the laptop works without a battery? I have seen some laptops that won't work unless a battery is inserted. Have you checked the voltage of the battery?

The only other thing I can think to try, I've heard to take the battery out of a laptop then hold the power button for about 10 secondsl I suppose this discharges the machine. Try again after that.
 
Ok, you'll be happy to know that I'm posting this from my laptop! The 10 second power button did the trick, however some things are still amiss.

My usb ports don't seem to work. My usb mouse wont light up when plugged into any port, and no device plugging in will trigger the windows plug in sound effect. One mouse I have sort of works; windows keeps recognizing it. It plays the pluging sound over and over, and the mouse lights up, but you can't use it. I thought this might be something to do with the usb ports not giving enough power, so i tried to plug in an external harddrive with it's own power cord, but that didn't work either.

The vga output does work though.

Any ideas from this point? What did the 10 second thing actually do?
 
I've looked in the device manager, and all my usb roots look good. They all have the "allow windows to turn them off" thing checked as well.

I checked my firewire port, and that works fine, so it seems to be just the usb that isn't working.

I reformatted completely and installed the recovery software and I'm getting the same usb problems. I assume this means it isn't software? What else can I check?

Thanks for all your help.
 
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