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ArcticMyst Security by Avery

Toshiba laptop failing after only 3 years.

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My computer is failing. I think its 3 years last month that I bought it. Its a Toshiba Satellite C655D-S5210 and it appears to be the hard drive that's failing, that's why I haven't been posting for the last 2 1/2 weeks.

Some days ago I was attempting to post my latest build thread and spent 2 hours working on that thread and when I was almost done my computer suddenly turned off! It started about a month ago, it has just turned off by itself with no warning about once a week, one time it took me 8 hours to get it to boot again. It is slow and sluggish with the browser or email or other things will stop responding for a few seconds at a time and I keep getting warning messages from Windows saying the hard drive is failing.

I have been using computers since the mid 80's and never had a HD fail after only 3 years. Am not sure if I will bother fixing it or not. It doesn't matter because I have just bought a new Lenovo that is way better than the Toshiba and it only cost about $25 more than the Toshiba did 3 years ago. One surprise I wasn't aware of, the 1 TB HD in my new Lenovo is a Toshiba HD! I hope this one will last longer. I should be back to normal on the new computer in a few days. I'll post at least a short review.

Alan
 





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Computer problems suck in so many ways. Sorry to hear about your HD issue but glad to see your back up and running with new hardware
 

sinner

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that sucks, good thing you're getting a new one.
from what i can suggest is they are the moving parts and so many things can go wrong if they are stressed i.e dropped while being operated, not defragmented regularly, they will eventually get slower and make a whole bunch of noises before they start to fail.. but still nothing like you're facing. this might be more of a circuitry issue.
 
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Woah, that's new. I know a lot of Toshiba laptops tend to overheat due to poor ventilation systems but never heard of hard drive failures at only 3 years. I would be expecting other problems at that point.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy your new computer!
 
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Yeah that's about what I was going to suggest as I was reading your symptoms was a hard drive failure. Also possible that the heat is getting to it. Thing about laptops is that they have a tendency to get clogged up with dust. Had mine for about 7 years almost now and it still runs like a charm because I keep it clean and serviced myself, but that's not always possible for everyone to do. What are these new satellites im finding are made cheaper and cheaper. I've been fixing lots of them lately.

Edit: try taking the hard drive out and blowing on the little breathing hole. it's possible that it's getting plugged up, which can cause the drive to behave erratic because it can't breathe, which causes overheating and incorrect pressure inside.
 
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That hole is only to equalize pressure, I believe. if it were for ventilation and cooling, it would be much larger.
 
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Yes. It's a a breathing hole to control the pressure inside, and the float point of the heads if I recall correctly from my classes. If it is blocked then the heads can't glide properly over the platters sometimes as the drive warms up. Most of the cooling is done by the lower casing, as well as dampening vibrations to the chassis...
 
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Meh, the quantity of air that moves through it as the drive heats up is pretty damn close to zero. It would have to be glued shut to cause performance issues.
 
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If the HDD is the cause of the problem, the failure is doing you a favor by forcing you to replace it. Go buy an SSD and replace that piece of shit. It'll make your laptop feel brand new. I've been using my Thinkpad T60 since 2007 because the SSD makes it so nice.

Do the same for your Lenovo. Besides the screen and keyboard and a minimum threshold of RAM, the SSD is probably the most important component to have in your laptop.
 
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Rifter

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I was a computer tech for years, HDD failures are very common, I have had dozens fail on me over the years either in my own or family members computers.

On the bright side its a simple and easy fix to install a new hard drive, its actually easier to do in most laptops vs a desktop.

I think I have a 2.5" 500GB WD black HDD sitting in my closet I can let go cheap if you want it. It was in my PS3 till my PS3's blu ray drive kicked the bucket.
 
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3Pig

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My pc was failing and I thought it was the hard drive, one day after a month of blue screens I looked inside... bloody CPU fan wasn't spinning :mad:
 
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My pc was failing and I thought it was the hard drive, one day after a month of blue screens I looked inside... bloody CPU fan wasn't spinning :mad:

Ouch. Yeah usually in that case the PC doesn't even turn on now....a well-made motherboard will end up throwing an error if the CPU fan doesn't spin up.
 
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I never heard of a PC just turning off due to the HD failing. Everything else seems to point at a bad HD though. Either that or malware or virus. The 2.5" hard drives are complete pieces of crap. I've had more drives fail in laptops than I have in desktops with normal 3.5" drives. It sucks that you can't get a quality 2.5" drive unless you go with SSD. My current laptop got a SSD for the primary drive earlier this year. The other one will eventually be replaced too.
 
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Never had a laptop drive fail on me personally yet. I definitely think SSDs are the way to go now if you have the money. The reliability is still spotty in some places, and security is a bit of an issue... But that's improving rapidly, as well as their write lifespans. I'm actually pretty amazed at how quickly they've dropped price over the last few years.
 
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ped

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I work in a phone & laptop repair shop, and the amount of 2.5" HD's I've replaced is absurd.

SSD's are superb, and like Kaiser said, if you have the money, go for it.
I have a 480GB SSD in my home computer , and it gets from "button press" switch on, to usable desktop in six seconds flat.
 
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The instant power-off is usually a symptom of overheating. You can download a program called CoreTemp to verify this is happening. If your CPU is known in the database, CoreTemp will list a Tjunction maximum. If your CPU hits that temp the motherboard pulls the plug to protect itself.

Most laptops have absolute bare minimum heatsinks and fans to minimize weight, cost and noise. They also tend to use cheap thermal paste. Pop the CPU sink off, clean it and apply new grease (ex Arctic Cooling MX series) and you can easily see a 10-20C temperature drop under load. Also blow out any dust bunnies with compressed air while you're in there.

This is what HP considers "adequate" cooling for a quad-core, hyper-threaded, Core i7 (65W TDP) and a discrete ATI Radeon hd6570m GPU (30W TDP)

cpuf.jpg
 




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