I've been having some trouble off and on with my smokin'-hot Toshiba laptop. Ironic that I used the term "smokin'-hot" to describe it when I talked about it. It is fast and all, yes, but over time the motherboard failed and it would just shut down. It was from over-heating. I replaced the motherboard once because it was such a high priced laptop.
I did think it was cool that it would run the Myst games with no problem. I also really liked the widescreen format while playing Myst Online since they support the widescreen format. I could see just a bit more on the edges of the screen. Still, the game is so laborious on the computer that it slowly became impossible to play it on the Toshiba. I moved my gameplay over to our desktop, an AMD Athlon 64 dual core HP computer. The Toshiba is becoming unusable and recently gave me some strange errors. It began randomly starting somewhere between regular mode and safe mode, what I termed "unusable mode" since nothing really works when it starts up this way.
I went to shop at my favorite computer store,
Micro Center. I chatted with one of the sales guys and described the "unusable mode" startup and heating issues. He said, "Oh, do you have a Pentium 4?" I said yes and he basically said
"Well there's your problem right there!" It seems that the Pentium 4 processor runs too hot for a laptop computer. While a great idea at the time, so to speak, in reality it proved to kill these Toshiba laptops. I am disappointed that the people that replaced my motherboard the first time did not know this. This reinforced my faith in Micro Center as well. So if you have a Toshiba Satellite with a Pentium 4 processor, be ready to shell out money on a better computer as some point. At least it shut down before it caught fire I guess.
