Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
I'm sitting in front of a Toshiba Satellite A5005 with a first-generation Core i3 CPU in it. It absolutely refuses to operate with GPU accelerated drivers. Standard VGA? Fine. Software rendering in X? Fine. But if I try to start a GUI that matches the purported capabilities of the panel and the GPU, the driver fails to load (Code 43 on Windows) or the X server hangs.
In this case, the GPU is part of the CPU, but the rest of the machine is not behaving abnormally. Temperatures are normal. Fans are blowing. RAM tests - at least through 10 cycles of testing - seem to be OK. I also blew away their Windows install for the factory image, to no avail.
I've tried four different versions of the appropriate Intel driver for Windows. I've read that some versions of the A5005 shipped with a Geforce 8400M, but this does not appear to be one of them. I used an OpenSuSE boot drive to check in Linux.
There are no BIOS options for control of any aspect of the graphics subsystem. Not even RAM aperture size.
This machine is basically functional as long as it's not doing anything other than 1024x768, but the only conclusion I can come to is that some aspect of the CPU has become defective. I don't really want to tell the user that because I can't find anything else wrong and I've never seen a CPU fail in that fashion.
Anyone else have an idea?
In this case, the GPU is part of the CPU, but the rest of the machine is not behaving abnormally. Temperatures are normal. Fans are blowing. RAM tests - at least through 10 cycles of testing - seem to be OK. I also blew away their Windows install for the factory image, to no avail.
I've tried four different versions of the appropriate Intel driver for Windows. I've read that some versions of the A5005 shipped with a Geforce 8400M, but this does not appear to be one of them. I used an OpenSuSE boot drive to check in Linux.
There are no BIOS options for control of any aspect of the graphics subsystem. Not even RAM aperture size.
This machine is basically functional as long as it's not doing anything other than 1024x768, but the only conclusion I can come to is that some aspect of the CPU has become defective. I don't really want to tell the user that because I can't find anything else wrong and I've never seen a CPU fail in that fashion.
Anyone else have an idea?
