Solved! Toshiba P205D-S7436 randomly shuts off.

[Kova]

Good morning Ladies and Gentlemen, today I come seeking help for my poor laptop. You see, it's the only thing that I have to keep my sanity and the only thing that provides entertainment. And now it's failing me, so I need your help.

This computer is now officially a year old, so the warranty is voided. It shipped with Windows Vista Home Premium. I am a college student so I mainly use the PC for simple tasks such as word processing, web surfing, and simple multimedia tasks like listening to music and watching movies. I began playing games on it such as World of Warcraft and Counter-Strike: Source and the performance was utterly rubbish. It was even worse than my old desktop which only had 1gb ram and a Pentium D processor. So I decided recently that it was time to rid myself of Vista and go for XP.

Up to now, the laptop has never had a problem with shutting off randomly, but earlier in the week I reformatted and installed XP, and it was fine. I installed the basic necessities, such as my favorite browser, an IM program and a music player. As I progressed, I eventually installed Counter-Strike:Source. I got to play it for about 5 minutes when all of a sudden, the laptop just bloody shut off without warning. When I rebooted the laptop, it got past the bios, and then the Win XP loading screen appeared, and it shut off again. I let the laptop sit for a good hour and came back, and when I rebooted it, it started fine. I didn't try to play the game again, but I was in my browser with a few tabs open and I had an installation going, and it shut off again.

I'm not too good with computers, but I'm guessing perhaps the hardware or something with the power isn't compatible with my components? The reason why I say this, is because the same day I had Vista running on it, it never had that issue in it's entire life, much less that day. But when I installed XP, this began happening.

All the correct drivers were installed but I went ahead and isolated a few variable extra programs that might make a difference:

AMD Dual Core Optimizer - A mate suggested I try this, to improve performance while playing games.
Windows XP Service Packs 2-3 I'm not certain if this has any bearing on the problem but it's what I installed.

Here is the link to the specifications of the laptop itself, I've made no adjustments to the hardware and even updated the BIOS like the customer support rep told me to.

http/www.csd.toshiba.com/cgi-bin/tais/support/jsp/modelContent.jsp?ct=SB&os=&category=&moid=1854882&rpn=PSPBLU&modelFilter=P205D-S7436&selCategory=3&selFamily=1073768663&selModel=1854882|PSPBLU

That's really all I can think of, I'd like to get back to playing my games and such. Any tips and help you can provide is greatly appreciated. Have a great day!

 

[cheaptofix]

please don't play games with laptops unless it costs £800 today. pcs are for games laptops are just for browsing internet.

your laptop is overheating "becoming hot" games add to the graphics work, so the poor graphic card has to work a lot lot harder then obviously she sweats like us but for her she overheats! then a safety mechanism says "you're too hot lady you need to shut down now before we all burn" so that's why your laptop shuts down randomly.

however overheating is treatable. do you know how to open a laptop apart and put it back together? if no then take it to a repair shop and ask them to clear out the dust, add thermal grease to both processor and graphic chip. and buy yourself a cooling board which goes under the laptop.

but again, never you'll get the real game experience with a laptop.
hope this helps...