Toshiba Satellite A135 - Touchpad and Keyboard

[amonre80]

Hello. I am in need of some advice. I recently purchased a used Toshiba laptop. Satellite A135.
My friend who sold it to me was having all sorts of overheating problems. So I though, no prob. I'll open her up and clean the heat sink and replace the thermal grease. Done and done.
I reloaded Vista Home Basic on the system using the Toshiba recovery CD. Everything going smooth so far.

Now here is where the problem comes into play. After a while of using the laptop, the touch pad and the keyboard will stop responding. Vista is still working away. Updated trying to download and other processes are still going. So the system isn't locked up. After a minute the screen will go blue. Like the BSOD, but with no text and the hard drive light turns off. So, I'm assuming that everything has stopped.

Now before I did the cleaning, the entire area around the keyboard was hot. Now the area towards the speakers are cool, but the area lower, by the touch pad is still getting hot. Now that's where the keyboard hooks up. Could heat be causing this? Or is there something else I can look into?

Please help me. I'm at a loss of what else to look at.

Edit:
Oh and I am running Vista in Windows Classic mode. I was hoping the lowered graphcs and effects would help, but it doesn't seem to help at all.

[BipolarBill]

Did you blow the dust out of the cooling tract?

[amonre80]

I had to take all of the laptop apart. I cleaned all the dust I saw on all the parts, but I'm honestly not sure where the cooling tract would be. I have just recently started working on laptops, this being my second.

[BipolarBill]

Pretty much all modern laptops have a cooling fan that draws cool air in and blows it over a heatsink and out an exhaust port. Find the exhaust port. It's on an outer edge somewhere. It may be clogged. Find the intake grill on the bottom. Blow air in there so that the dust exits the exhaust. Alternatively, you can partially disassemble the unit, turn it on and blow air directly into the fan. That should clear out the cooling tract.

[Rootstonian]

The hot spot around keyboard is either due to battery or hard drive location. My dell lappy at work gets downright nasty warm on the left side and that's where the hd is.

[amonre80]

Quote:

Originally Posted by BipolarBill

Pretty much all modern laptops have a cooling fan that draws cool air in and blows it over a heatsink and out an exhaust port. Find the exhaust port. It's on an outer edge somewhere. It may be clogged. Find the intake grill on the bottom. Blow air in there so that the dust exits the exhaust. Alternatively, you can partially disassemble the unit, turn it on and blow air directly into the fan. That should clear out the cooling tract.

All of that dust was removed. I literally had to take this laptop completely apart to get at the heat sink to unclog it. There was no dust left inside of the laptop when I got done with it.

[amonre80]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Rootstonian

The hot spot around keyboard is either due to battery or hard drive location. My dell lappy at work gets downright nasty warm on the left side and that's where the hd is.

I can see the HD and memory causing heat in the area, but would it be getting hot enough to cause my symptoms? and if it is what else can I do to keep it cooler in that area? Even a cooling pad does not seem to be enough. I'm wondering if it could be a symptom of something else other than heat?

[amonre80]

No more ideas? I'm still really stuck and I'd hate to cut this as a loss.

[amonre80]

It seems that the GPU, ATI Radeon Xpress 200m, is sitting directly under the touchpad. So the GPU is getting extremely hot just running windows in classic mode. Is there a way to control the temperature on a mobile gpu to keep it cooler?

Edit:
I have updated the video drivers and bios as well now in hopes it would help. No luck
Is it possible to add in a heatsink for the GPU?