toshiba satellite 2805-s402 locks up

Hi!

I purchased the Toshiba Satellite 2805-S402 and found it to be a wonderful laptop. Everything was great until one faithful day when I ran Windows Media player and scrolled through a Tcl/Tk documentation web page using Internet Explorer. The computer locked up and froze completely: I had to manually power down the machine. The crash kept happening for me with upgraded Internet Explorer and Winamp (instead of the Media Player). I was running out of options.

Toshiba acknowledged the problem and told me to crank down my graphics acceleration almost to nothing (which fixed the problem completely). However, I am not content with this "workaround" since I paid almost 3K for this machine. Toshiba said that they will not provide a video driver upgrade. Now, the reason (I think) this problem is related to video driver is because of 2 things:

1) microsoft had the same problem reported against ATI Rage card for which ATI assumed full responsibility and fixed their video driver (search microsoft's knowledge base with key words "lock" "scrolling" "webpage" "hang up" )

2) cranking down the graphics acceleration to nothing fixes the problem.

Now anyone who is buying this laptop model or any other Toshiba laptop with the same graphics adapter (Nvidia GeForce2 Go) should beware of the problems I described here for they are very real. Check what Dave Stanovic from Team Toshiba said in response to my message on the Toshiba's discussion forum:

http://go.compuserve.com/toshiba?MSG=1112358

Now, I may be wrong about the real causes of the problem, but at least I know how to reproduce it and Toshiba knows that. But Toshiba refuses to investigate this problem further and continues selling their laptops with useless graphics accelerators that cannot be run at full capacity (or else they cause machine crashes that are deadly to hard drives). I forgot to mention that because of the manual power downs I was forced to do, the hard drive on the laptop began losing clusters. That's right - there is more to this problem than just a simple crash! As I have mentioned before: both of these problems were reproduced and verified by the Toshiba representative Dave Stanovic. You can read all of my mail exchange with him regarding this problem on the Toshiba’s discussion forum in the Video section (try the URL I gave above).

Anyways, here it is. If you have a Satellite 2805-S402 or any other model with the same graphics adapter, be careful when you are listening to mp3 music and browsing the web.

Yours,

-igor.