Having problems with a Satellite Pro L20. It will power up on the odd occasion and goes to the bios and everything seems fine but then when you save the settings and exit it will not reboot.
Seems as if it’s left for a while it will boot ok again into the bios. Battery charges and machine will run of either the battery or the mains charger although if the battery is removed the laptop won’t boot up.
Have had the thing apart and removed the heat sink and replaced all the thermal paste which may have helped somewhat. There are signs of a drink having been spilt over the keyboard and palmrest but no one will own up …. lol.
Can’t see any obvious signs of damage on the motherboard even with a magnifying glass.
Any idea please?

A little time has past since my last post – see above – so here it is, all the latest on my pride and joy and an insight into my new life as an OverClocker Extraodinaire.

Win7 arrived and it loaded a dream. Damm that Bill unlike the rest of humanity he actually earns his dosh. It was so easy anyone can do this today, even me.

First the bad news. The pin mod on the Dothan 2.1GHz didn’t work. Booted into windows fine, turned over fine, but and even with a voltage pin mod thrown in for good luck the FSB simply wouldn’t budge from stock 100MHz.I didisee someone say this pin mod was reliable throughout the entire Dothan range and sure enough someone else said it only worked up to the 1.8GHz model. Well that last one was right but I suspect it had nothing to do with the practice of binning.

Now for the good news. I managed to return the 2.1GHz and for an extra fiver plus P+P I got my hands on a Dothan, but no ordinary Dothan this one was the top of the range 2.26GHz Dothan 780 with ‘Centrino’ architecture. Centrino means the cpu will support a 533MHz bus – but only if the board has it to give in the first place. According to Sandra, the ultimate diagnostics program on the planet and the only one worth buying, this generic/noname board supports not only 533MHz but also FSBs of up to 800MHz. That should mean there is plenty of headroom for some software ocing even without the now redundant pin mod.

The day the cpu arrived I was all aflutter, excited you bet I was. I carefully disassembled my lappy for the 1000th time and installed the 780 without bending any pins. With an aching wrist I booted and looked in the Bios..YES the bios had it all present and accounted for and Cpuid reported all was fine with a 533MHz bus and a stock frequency of 2.26GHz. YES!YES!Light speed was even now a possibility I thought. Confidence was HIGH!

Now it was time for the software oc. CPUcool was selected as the weapon of choice. I did look at most if not all of the opposition including Clockgen, SetFSB etc etc but as the memory in this machine is completely off limits in all the other sofware (it is even in CPUcool), I had to find a program that would adjust the FSB by way of tweaking the dividers. To do this the PLL on the motherboard had to be listed within the program’s database and CPUcool’s database included my PLL. So it was easy, well fairly, at the end of the day to part with another $17.00. If it’s of any interest to anyone out there this PLL is manufactured by ICS, the full chip spec is ICS 531967 0534 951413CGLF, the important bit is the 951413 as this defines the PLL family. The letters CGLF only defines the subset. Armed with a paidfor copy I loaded up the program selected my PLL and waited…..UP came the screen and then it was tweak time.

Days later or was it weeks or months, maybe years even, who knows, (these programs are so addictive) and I have settled for, well for today at least, on the following specs:
Divider 64.2667
Gear 3.386MHz
FSB 153.36MHz
Frequency 2607.18MHz – A very comfortable OC of 15% on stock.

Temperature, as these pages keep reminding us, is an all important statistic and this little program constantly tells you the cpu core temp which in turn can easily be minimised to the tray to keep an eye on. Here I admit I did cheat.I did buy a tube of diamond paste. Yes this stuff really is made from from diamonds – I kid not. It keeps the heat down to no more than 45C and that’s under full load, so it was worth every cent or is that carrot, karat, korrott who knows, anyway the stuff is great.

Next I called up Sandra for a quick verification. Sandra tells me that all was well under the bonnet and that “She can go faster Cap’n”, so I closed the intercom and made a log entry. Having flushed I then set phasers to full power and issued the instruction “Shields up! We’re going in!”….and set to work benchmarking the cpu. Nice – 4Gflops, which is very respectable and what’s more it’s also 100% stable – no blue screens and no hangssssssssss. Yes, Yes, I’ve been there now as we all have. At first it’s a bit worrysome, but to reassure any of you should you ever consider such lunacy all be it in the privacy of your own home, even a novice like me didn’t manage to explode or brick my pride and joy. BUT do take it easy at first until you get the hang of how these dividers impact on the FSB – Back Off!

The temptation to screw over Intel by extracting way more MHz or even GHZ than they ever bargained you would get for your hard earnt £ is simply enormous and is one of the overriding pleasures of this entire exercise in techno agrandissement. Even today that smug sense of delight and satisfaction at getting one over is still a joy to behold each and every single time I boot up and see 2607.18MHz glowing in the tray. Hallelujah! and I am not a religous person. Try to think of me as being a bit like Stephen Hawking, a God but in my own wheelchair.

Can it go faster, that’s what we all want to see isn’t it? Well that’ll have to wait as my main concern now is the crappy chopped down Toshiba AMD Win7 OEM drivers that came from Microsft by way of an a driver installation update. As we ocers say ‘these drivers suck Big Time’, so hold on to your hats, it looks like we’re in for a bumpy ride. More twiglets please.

Now not only am I running the original Pentium cpu of 1.4Ghz at an incredible 1.86Ghz with no ill after effects at all, I am about to replace the cpu with a Pentium Dothan 2.1Ghz(£60-ebay) which I will OC with the same pin mod. This will produce a very respectable and workable machine turning over at 2.73Ghz, and 100% stable if this last ‘upgrade’ is anything to go by.

One of the additional benefits of this non volt pin mod is the upped responsiveness of the overall system as the FSB is now also 30% faster. This has resulted in a faster ‘snappier’ system overall. Programs don’t lag on opening and vidoes now play full screen at 720p and at a halfdecent 25fps.

Windows7 beckons for this aging xp dino, there is a Home Premium copy now winging it’s way to me even as I write this. The only cloud on the horizon is that I will have to use the awful crappy ‘Toshiba’ type 2006 Xpress X200M graphics drivers.

It would be so good to install the last proper XP Catalyst drivers (10.3 – I think)or even in the near future the windows7 ones. I have already tried all sorts of combinations with the various earlier Catalyst versions, but they will not install.

Toshiba seem to have put a file on this machine which prevents the real ATI and full Catalyst suite drivers from loading. This means when I do the OS upgrade I will get a lousy aero spec and poor screen display.

Well you can’t have everything I suppose, and I am very pleased to have found your page without it the wonders of the pin mod along with the volt mod and how to apply thermal compound and all it’s variants to incredibly small things, in very small spaces would have eluded me completely. Now I speak with a new found confidence and certantity on things which only 5 days ago I had little or no understanding. Some might disagree with this bold statement but at least no dare to suggest as much in polite company.

Thank you once again.

i have a toshiba satellite L25-S1192 that i dropped the other night and now the screen doesnt light up. the screen works u see that the screen still works but it is dark. i was wondering if there is a bulb i can change or a board that might have gone bad. So if anyone has any suggestions on how to fix it i would greatly appriciate it.

First of all, I would try reconnecting cables on the inverter board and back of the LCD screen. It’s possible that one of these cables got loose. If it doesn’t help, most likely the backlight lamp got damaged.
The backlight lamp is mounted INSIDE the LCD screen and it’s very hard to replace. If I have to repair a laptop with bad/damaged backlight lamp, I replace the entire screen.

If you want to try replacing just the lamp, take a look at this guide: http://www.laptoprepair101.com/laptop/2007/12/09/replace-laptop-backlight-ccfl-lamp/