Toshiba Satellite M35X. How to fix most common laptop problems.
Toshiba Satellite M35X is a very popular model in the United States. In general, most Toshiba Satellite M35X laptops suffer from the same problems. Here’s a disassembly guide.
Improperly grounded top cover assembly. If the top cover assembly wasn’t grounded properly, then laptop may lock up or freeze up when you touch it in the speaker area. It happens because of a static electricity discharge. This problem was fixed on some laptops, but still there are a lot of laptops with unmodified top cover assembly. This problem should be covered under warranty even if you laptop is not under warranty anymore.
Poorly designed DC-IN power jack on the system board. Overtime, the DC power jack gets disconnected from the system board. If it happens, you will experience a problem with charging the battery or the laptop may not start at all.
Read more:
Toshiba Satellite M35X and A75 power jack and battery charge problem.
Toshiba Satellite 1900 laptop looses power and shuts down without warning.
Laptop CPU overheating. It is a very common problem for some Toshiba laptops. If a laptop CPU overheats, then the laptop shuts down without by itself without any reason. Read more:
Why my Toshiba laptop suddenly shuts down by itself without warning?
You can use the disassembly guide to take apart Toshiba Satellite M35X notebook and repair it yourself. Do not open the case if your laptop is still under warranty.
Need spare parts for your laptop? Search here by the laptop model and part name or number.
July 20th, 2010 at 1:09 am
hello, i’m using toshiba satellite L40, and i am facing power issues.the problem is when i put off and again on my laptop powers on or else it never starts.the same thing happens when i try to use it without battery i mean with the charger adapter.once i switch off my laptop from windows it never powers on again unless i put off my adapter jack off and on again…hope u understood my problem..thank you…
July 17th, 2010 at 9:58 am
Murthy,
Nope, it’s not necessary to replace the motherboard.
You can replace just the DC jack. You can follow this guide: http://www.laptoprepair101.com/laptop/2007/12/06/dc-power-jack-repair-guide/
Good luck!
June 15th, 2010 at 6:11 pm
I have a 5 year old Toshiba Satellitte M35-S329 laptop and the DC inject is broken. It does not charge and the battery is les than a year old. The charging cord is also new. When i leave it to charge, the light flickers and it barely charges. I was told that the problem is with the DC jack and the entire Motherboard and DC jack needs to be replaced for $250-300 plus labor. The reason I was told was that the motherboard is attached to the DC jack in these models.
I can find a DC jack for this model on ebay for less than $10. Besides labor cost, is it necessary to buy a motherboard also?
Please advise
May 25th, 2010 at 11:13 am
I have an M35x-S149 that I’ve been battling with for the better part of a year now. Originally it was my mother’s laptop and after a while it would spontaneously freeze up. No error messages in Windows at all. Then once the DC-Jack broke free of the board, she gave it to me and never wanted to see it again. After fixing the jack I found that it would still have these freezing issues. I couldn’t even get all the way through an OS installation without it freezing (I literally spent a week trying to install ANY OS on it, only to have the thing freeze up EVERY time). Frustratingly I could do any CPU, Ram, or HDD test I wanted to and nothing would freeze it for single component testing. I let Memcheck run for 48 hours straight with no issues. It appeared that whatever was causing the problems was happening when the system was using multiple systems (IE high power drain).
Hearing about the grounding issues, I brought it to my static bench at my workplace and THOROUGHLY grounded it (Soldered wires on every offending piece and put in fresh grounding foil everywhere that needed it). Booted it up and tried to install redhat on it. It promptly froze barely 10% into the installation. I tried again with Windows xp, again it froze. On a whim I pulled the battery and tried again with windows xp. Installed perfectly. Thinking I had gotten lucky, I worked on the laptop for a few hours (Installed drivers, software, etc) still no freeze. From here I decided to do a GPU stress test (since this tends to be the most power intensive operation). I let it run for an hour, no freeze.
At this point I shut down the system and put the battery back in. I disconnected it from mains power and turned it on. It booted into windows, sat there for about 30 seconds, then rebooted. I let the system do this about 4 times before I was convinced I had the problem sussed.
In my case either the battery or the battery power circuit is bad. Having the battery and mains connected at the same time was causing the freezing when the computer drew high load. It’ll also freeze up if I pop in the battery while it’s running. If anyone else is having freezing problems, I highly recommend pulling the battery and seeing if the system starts to work again.
From here I’m going to try to purchase a cheap replacement battery (Used, 3rd party, etc) and see if I can narrow down my actual point of failure. If I get a solid conclusion I’ll share it.
April 4th, 2010 at 8:01 pm
i want to expand my memory (ram) to more than 526 mg, because when am working with auto cad it gets slowing down and a message “losing virtual memory” appears. how do i know if there’s available slot for memory without opening the back of my toshiba satelite m30’s back. thankyou
April 3rd, 2010 at 3:14 pm
sry i meant to add MY DAD has a toshiba sattelite and when
April 3rd, 2010 at 3:13 pm
when he turns it on..it doesnt go to boot sequence, he has to shut it off and turn it on multiple times to get it to turn on..what the hell is wrong? i thought it was the cd drive because he had it out of it for a while but he put it back in and it still does it, his laptop is a Toshiba satellite with windows vista home premium…and i might think its the cmos battery.
March 10th, 2010 at 12:17 pm
Great guide! De-mystifies the items that need to be pryed apart >:( (boo for all manufacturers that do this)
However the formating leaves a bit to be desired, I can’t keep this on the screen while I work since I only have the one computer, and when I tried to print I get all the extrainious stuff around the edges of the webpage and some things fon’t fit well.
A “Printer Friendly” version would make it complete.
Still, thank you for posting the info, now I can clean the crud out of this thing and maybe find out why the left 40% of my screen has a white cast to it (low contrast).
February 28th, 2010 at 11:11 am
JIM,
There could be some grounding issue I think.
I would remove the top cover assembly and take a look at the bottom part of the top cover. Make sure nothing touches the motherboard. Maybe something is not seated properly, o a metal piece on the bottom part of the top cover shorting the motherboard.
Try running the laptop with the top cover removed. Can you make it fail when the top cover is removed?
February 27th, 2010 at 6:59 pm
For those who have a notebook Satellie M35x and the screen light does not turns on, but the things are there, i mean disk ram, OS is going well… You may have to weld a piece placed at the bottom of the screen, you may remove the screws and take off the black cover, you’ll see chip at the bottom chek the pieces, you’ll probably find that a pin needs to be welded. It works for me.
Now im having a problem because I try to turn my lap on and then a secuence of beeps starts, it does not even boot, but i think it could be fixed simply by cleaning, removing rams and clean everuthing there, and chek unwelded parts.
Sorry for my english im learning. hope my replay helps.
February 26th, 2010 at 6:24 am
HAVE a Toshiba M35X-S329 had a power jack problem replaced
that. Put everything back , It run it great no more losing power and all ,but now if I touch the laptop around where the power plug is the screen goes off and everything else stays on.
I reboot it and sometimes everything will come on as far as the power but then stops ,blank screen. So maybe there is another problem . I will tap it around where the video plug is and then reboot and it will be okay ,then I touch that area it will go off.I guess the mother board..Right?
February 1st, 2010 at 12:56 pm
i have smae problem.like when i on my m35x-s111.the lights comeup and the sount of fan for 5 sec and than nothing.can u tell me aheat is going on and also i can,t open my cd rom too pls help me.thnkas
December 23rd, 2009 at 3:30 pm
how do i restore my toshiba satellite m35x- back to factory settings
December 19th, 2009 at 9:55 am
I have the solution for the non booting Toshiba m35 that I wrote almost a year ago. This tutorial is applicable to laptops that shut down without any warning, laptops that turn on only sometimes, and laptops that simply refuse to turn on (LEDs blink, fan spins up for a second and then everything just goes dead). So if your laptop does not turn on, it goes completely dead within a few minutes after bootup, here’s the link to the tutorial. The repair takes about an hour, there’s no need of replacing any parts, reinstalling any software or any other thing. The only investment in repairing your laptop with this tutorial is your time. Basically, you can repair your laptop within the hour, without spending any money for any parts or software.
http://imateski.blogspot.com/2008/08/toshiba-satellite-m35x-motherboard.html
December 6th, 2009 at 11:52 am
I have a M35X-S3112. The screen fails to light up or goes black while in use. Pushing the close button multiple times usually brings the screen back to life. Each push of the close button will cause a flicker or flash or attempt to light up on the screen. Sometimes the close button will restore the screen for the duration of use, other times it’s only temporary.
Any ideas?
December 6th, 2009 at 10:57 am
I have a toshiba m35x s111 and sometimes when I press the start button I hear a beeping sound and I see nothing on the screen. I then unplug the unit and try to restart again. Sometimes it comes on and sometimes it reverts back to the beeping sound. The laptop is about 5 years old so I don’t know if it’s on it last leg or not. Got any suggestions?
December 5th, 2009 at 3:12 pm
On step 15 there is a photo that I think shows the bios chip.
It looks to me to be socketed. Can you confirm this?
M305-S4910
December 1st, 2009 at 8:03 am
I’ve tried removing the memory to see if it was the culpert. Still having the same problem.
Here’s more info: When the booting up problem occurs, and after several restarts, the laptop will fully boot up, but then I discover that my D drive would go missing.
And this only happened once, where the computer just shut off by itself.
Any more suggestions?
November 28th, 2009 at 10:29 pm
I have a M35X that keeps locking up (freeze) requiring me to give it the finger. I have gone thru all the virus work, registry, ran memory check program. Any idea’s where to look next
November 28th, 2009 at 12:36 pm
a,
I think it’s just a coincidence. Most likely your problem is not related to the virus infection.
It’s possible that your problem is related to the memory failure.
You have two modules installed in your laptop, correct? It’s very unlikely that both memory modules failed at the same time.
You can try removing memory modules one by one and test the laptop with each one separately. It should start fine when the bad module is removed.
November 27th, 2009 at 9:51 am
I have a toshiba satellite m70 laptop.
I got hit with a virus, I used mbam to remove everything, but a couple of days later when I try to start up my laptop it won’t go past the toshiba logo page. Even if I press F12 or F2 it just stalls there, so I had to power down and restart it. Sometimes I have to do that up to 15 times for it to fully boot up.
I used Chkdsk to see if there was any problems, nothing was found.
What can be causing this?
October 16th, 2009 at 10:51 am
i need driver recovery for toshiba satelite m35 x.by free downloading .please help me thanks
September 28th, 2009 at 12:35 am
could someone tell me where is the cmos battery located (with picture), model toshiba satellite M40X-184. i forget the bios pwd, so is there any other ways to reset this pwd other than taking out the cmos battery?.
September 9th, 2009 at 6:31 am
Hi there, I’m looking for help with Toshiba Satellite M40X please. Product was bought in Canada & is out of warranty. Laptop keeps freezing, I have put in the recovery disc, but it is still freezing after about an hour or less working on it. If anyone can help I would be very grateful.
September 6th, 2009 at 5:23 am
main system chip faulty, cpu fan screw damege, processor socket damege
August 28th, 2009 at 3:04 pm
Has anyone used the repair that Jerry (jrhirsch) has outlined for isolating the jack from the motherboard and/or used his repair service. I’d like to get some feed-back form anyone that has. Thanks in advance.
August 25th, 2009 at 9:06 pm
Marc F,
First of all, check RAM modules. If you have two RAM modules installed, remove them one by one and test the laptop with each one separately. Try installing a known good RAM module and test the laptop again.
If replacing/reconnecting/swapping memory doesn’t help, most likely you have a problem with the motherboard.
August 24th, 2009 at 12:28 pm
I have a TOSHIBA SATELLITE M35X-S149 that does not boot. The blue power light and fan comes on (fan ran for 5 seconds and stop), nothing else.
August 20th, 2009 at 5:55 am
Need help PLEASE. I was cleaning my husbands M35X-S149 laptop. I was wiping down the side with a cloth, on the right side there is a small square headed button I pushed on it and something right next to the button came out. I pushed the card or what ever it is that came out back into the case I can not get the square headed button to stay in as it was before. it is sticking out of the case about 1/2 of an inch. Husband is at work, I would really like to get this taken care of before he returns. THANK You
August 12th, 2009 at 8:26 pm
Alex,
Have you tried replacing memory?
I’m pretty sure you can make it boot if you apply some pressure on the motherboard and turn on the laptop. Apply some pressure on the area close to the left hinge with your thumb and turn the laptop on while applying the pressure. Will it turn on this way?
I’ve seen this many times before. If that’s the case, there is a problem with the motherboard and it has to be replaced.