One of my customers complained that his Toshiba Satellite M45 laptop freezes up after playing a DVD movie for about 30 minutes to an hour. First of all I booted the laptop to Windows to check a basic functionality of the computer. It booted fine and Windows OS appeared to be in a good shape. The laptop was fast and responsive. I left it on for 30 minutes and it didn’t fail. After that I launched a DVD player and started a home made DVD disc provided by the customer. After playing the movie for about 25 minutes, the laptop locked up. The video on the display froze up and vertical lines of flickering white dots appeared on some areas of the LCD screen. The video still was on the display but the laptop didn’t response to any keystroke and needed a hard reboot. I connected the laptop to an external monitor and tried to play a different DVD disc but it didn’t make any difference. The laptop locked up after 20 minutes and the same patter of vertical lines of dots appeared on the external monitor, so it’s not the LCD screen problem. From my experience I know that this kind of failure may occur because of bad memory modules. I started testing both 1GB memory modules with Memtest 86+ utility but the laptop locked up before I finished testing. Only after I removed both memory sticks and installed a good known test memory module I was able to play the customers DVD overnight and the laptop didn’t fail. To make sure that both memory slots on the system board are fine I installed my memory into the second slot and tested the laptop again. It worked fine.
So, the laptop didn’t fail with my memory stick installed into both memory slots on the system board. It means that the memory slots on the system board are good and the system board is good itself. Now it is time to test customer’s memory. I installed my 512MB memory stick in slot 1 and first customer’s memory stick into slot 2 and put the laptop on my bench to play a DVD movie. The laptop didn’t fail for 1 hour. After that I installed my 512MB memory into slot 2 and second customer’s stick into slot 1 and started the movie. The laptop didn’t fail again. OK, both 1GB memory sticks work fine with a combination with my 512MB memory, but do not work together. For some reason the laptop can manage 1.5GB of memory but cannot manage 2GB. Oh man! I do not know why I didn’t do it before, may be I didn’t sleep enough at night. Only after I spent all these time troubleshooting memory sticks, I decided to check Toshiba website for a new BIOS updates for this laptop. The laptop had BIOS v1.0 and this version was not even listed on Toshiba website. I guess it was some kind of pre-production version. The current version was 1.10. After I updated the BIOS I didn’t see the problem with the video output anymore.
Attention! 
Before you spend time troubleshooting a good working hardware, CHECK for BIOS updates first. It helps a lot.
Before you spend time troubleshooting a good working hardware, CHECK for BIOS updates first. It helps a lot.
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