I hate it when people flame a company because they don't "jump" when someone screams... Toshiba makes some of the best laptops that can be found, and they actually build many of them themselves, while almost all other companies (such as Dell, Gateway, Voodoo, etc)l don't even build their own laptops at all. There are hundereds of parts inside a laptop, most of them custom-built for that very laptop model. If a company starts recalling every laptop model that a person claims is showning a known problem(such as 100 people that ruined their some-what inadequately built video cards, such as the guy that I purchased the 5105 from, while most standard users with the same card have no problem), then that company would be spending a much larger portion of it's time and money just "maintaining". Everyone would still be complaining that their laptops had to be shipped out for several weeks for preventative maintenance, and laptop prices would go up significantly. Many of these problems don't show up for one to two years down the road, and surely no-one would expect a company to field-test a new laptop for a year or more before they release it to the public. So where does that leave us? If you want a laptop that will almost definitely last for 3-5 years everytime, then you could go buy a Panasonic Toughbook for $5000. If your video card goes bad within the amount of time that Toshiba guarantees that your laptop will work for, then they will fix it. If the laptop is not properly repaired, then that is a problem with the service department, which is a problem with most companies, not just Toshiba. If you video card fails after your guarantee has expired, then you shouldn't expect Toshiba to fix it for free, as they had no better way of knowing if that video card was going to fail after two years than you or I did.... If Ford found out that they had starters that went out for 1 percent of the owners a year after their warantee expires everytime, they are not going to offer free repairs for customers after the warantee runs out, because some parts will fail after a given period of time, and
that is the purpose of the limited warantee.....
Now having said that, the original cards do not like an excessive amount of heat or vibration after they get a little older, and this is compounded by too much physical tweaking or motion, or playing graphics intensive video games. The video processor is rated to run at it's manufacturer-claimed speed when using a heatsink of the type specified by the manufacturer. This does not mean that the part cannot be used for other purposes in the absence of a heat sink. In fact, the same procedure has been used for years when using desktop processors in laptops, or mini-desktop systems. It is easy for someone so install non-Toshiiba Geforce drivers on their system allowing for custom clockrates that can quickly destroy a GPU, and the card that I had to replace had that very thing done to it to destroy it by the person that I bought it from. If you change hardware parameters of your system, you should only do so if you know that just because an electronic component has a specific rating doesn't necessarily mean that is how the engineer designed it into the circuit. If you can find a replacement part from Toshiba, then "suck it up" and spend the $100 dollars for the new design board(unless Toshiba deny's your trade-in, because you clocked up your chip), and go on enjoying a still very superior laptop. The new board is much beefier than the old one, and I would expect no problems from it. It is still working well here after two weeks.....
Hitek
PS- Fujitsu, though, is also a very good brand, that also makes some of their own laptops....
