rajah99

Hi

I bought a second hand toshiba satellite p100-240 recently. it came with winodws XP MCE, and for two days it was working fine. I tested it with sisoft sandra, 3dmark, many games etc. All played well, and it wasnt overheating and performing really well.

Then on the third day, it just turned off whilst i was using it. On rebooting, it would reach the point of just logging into windows XP Media centre edition, and then switch off. Even in safe mode, exaclty the same thing would happen. I left it for some hours, in case it had overheated, but same thing happened when i retested. I blew cold air around all the vents etc also.

I tried the Knoppix live cd, and initially it would power off midway into booting up. Then i tried running the Knoppix with a "acpi=off" option, and it booted fine!

Also, I tried many DOS boot based utils and these all worked fine. I tested the disk, the cpu (stress and burn in tests), the memory (memtest). All the tools ran fine, and all tested ok ( and the machine did not switch off)

I tried to install a copy of windows XP alongside the XP MCE, but it got to the installation screen listing the existing partitions, and the machine would just power off.

So trying the ACPI trick from Knoppix, I tried to install Windows XP without ACPI ( i.e. STANDARD pc), and it got through the installation fine. I now have a fully functioning laptop again, and can play all the games etc as before. All I have missing are a few ACPI related power options.

Now, what I would like to know, is this ACPI issue a hardware related or BIOS related issue?

Im running BIOS 4.40, which is the latest BIOS for the p100-240 (PSPA3E).

Is there a previous BIOS, that is perhaps more stable, and will get around this ACPI issue? But the confusing thing is how it all worked fine for a day and a half initially?

Any thoughts would help.