Toshiba Satellite Freezing Problems

[Bob McDonald]

Hello,

I'm hoping that someone will be able to help me at least narrow down what the
problems I am having on my laptop might be.  Ideally someone will say, "Oh I
had that, this is what you did wrong dummy," but google hasn't been much help
to me so far.

The background:

Japanese Toshiba Dynabook Satellite 1800 SA10AP/4 -
http://dynabook.com/pc/catalog/limited/rps180ap/index_j.htm
This has been updated from 128Mb RAM to 384Mb RAM but the problem happened
before the upgrade too
4.9-Release - custom kernel with acpi (power management) and pcm0 included
XWindow manager - I have tried Gnome and KDE and it has happened on both and on
my current one - Ion

The Problem:

I think there are actually two problems, but both of them involve the machine
freezing leaving me unable to do anything.  Just to answer a question that I've
gotten before I tried ctrl-alt-backspace to no avail.

1) When I play video (both MPlayer and xine) the display will sometimes get a
seemingly random bright colored pattern on it and the machine will stop
responding.  This seems to be more likely to happen as the machine has been
used for a longer amount of time, and particularly if a video has been played
before.  I'm not sure if it is related but with the same things increasing
likelihood the player will sometimes put up a bright green screen with letter
shadows on it and play only the sound.

2) If I leave the machine on at night it will sometimes freeze up on a screen
saver or blank screen, and the machine will not respond.

both of these problems require me to switch the power off an on again.

Anyone have any ideas?
thanks,

Bob

P.S. I noticed just now that my gkrellm CPU temperature monitor (no idea if it
is accurate or not) says that my CPU temperature is at 70c.  I have never
noticed it being that high before, but that could be the cause.  I have thought
before that it may be acpi not functioning quite right causing the problem as
my battery life went way down when I installed FreeBSD too.  If anyone has any
ideas about straightening that out it may solve the problem indirectly.

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