Tim Kloos - January 28th, 2015
I was approached by someone having trouble with their laptop. It ran slowly and eventually would just freeze with nothing to be done but power down. This is what I did to get that machine working again.
This machine was a toshiba satellite a355-s6935. It was running windows vista home premium (sp1, 64-bit version).
My first attempt at trying to fix this machine was to perform a system restore so I could go back to the last working setup. Unfortuntely, there were no restore points created.
I then tried altering the setup of the anti-virus to keep the machine from freezing up. This proved fruitless. I then performed a memory test and ran repairs at the BIOS level. Neither of these worked. I then contacted toshiba about this issue. I went ahead and ordered (as recommended by them) recovery media disks. These were about $20 dollars. Upon receiving and trying to run them, an error occured and I received the following message: "error: 10-fA13-045D - faulty hard drive, replace hard drive ". I purchased a new hard drive and replaced the old hard drive with it. I then ran the recovery disc from toshiba. This worked and allowed me to return the machine to factory settings. The machine was returned to a satisfied customer.
One thing I learned from this experience is that often when a machine is having problems, the issue is the hard drive. I've noticed this in another occasion since this incident. Also, this gives creedence to what I was once told: that the parts that fail most often on computers are the hard drives and fans - because they have moving parts.