Standardizing Toshiba

Officials at Toshiba recently confirmed a problem with a select batch of Toshiba laptop Satellite 4100XDVD computers that causes the mobile units to overheat and fail within a week following their deployment.

One San Diego-based MIS manager reported that “Recently, they ordered a large number of the Toshiba units, and two out of every three laptops died,". According to the users that had them, the machines would get very hot then just shut down, permanently.

The vice president of marketing for Toshiba's portable computer systems group informed later that they are aware of this problem and have been working on it for several weeks. The problem stems from a specific lot of daughter cards that support the Intel Mobile Module that carries the 400MHz Pentium II and Celeron Intel processors used in the faulty Toshiba laptops.

A standard daughter card was utilized for all the Satellite 4100XDVD laptops in an effort to span several generations of Intel Pentium and Celeron processors and to evade having to re-engineer the motherboard of the system every time a faster processor was launched.

Although this technique passed saving along to Toshiba laptop users as the company installed generation after generation of Intel processor, at one point a disruption in the system logic occurred, causing the laptops to fail.

When you design a computing system, you have to take into account the processors that will be coming. In this case, Intel made some change inside the microprocessor that Toshiba didn't know about, and fortunately, it happened in a very controlled group of units.

According to Intel, design specifications for each new generation of processor are shipped along with the product. Intel used to put out a normal set of design specification. And manufacturers design to the design specification. But if someone gets right up to the edge of the design spec, then there can be a concern.

For the most part, anything pushing near the tolerance of the design spec should work, but if they find something up on the edge of the specification and it's not working as it should, if that's the case, then Toshiba must have to look.

Toshiba was trying to standardize their engineering, and that's a wise thing to do. But there are times that the design marginality gets crossed over to where there's a problem and something needs to be aligned or adjusted.

In the case of the Toshiba laptops, the solution requires "minor work on the daughter card. Customers experiencing the problem should report it to their service vendor or directly to Toshiba.

The laptop can run continuously for long hours, playing digital music. This is a power-intensive activity, because it uses the hard drive a lot. You don't have to take any special power-saving precautions, relying only on the default settings in Toshiba's excellent power-management software. You also didn't have to allow the machine to remain in standby mode. When the internal battery flagged, just snap on the battery slice and press the button.

Toshiba has created another good power-saving touch. This machine performs hibernation faster and better than any laptop. Hibernation is a process whereby the machine saves an image of its running programs and files on the hard disk, then shuts down to preserve the battery. When you want to work again, all your stuff is restored to life, just where you left off. This is a slow procedure on most machines, but on the new Portege, it's very quick and reliable.