Black Screen of Death (Vista)

Toshiba A215 have hardware problem with "blank screen".

There are solutions:

I called Toshiba and talked to a support person who guided me through several steps:
1. check BIOS version - it should be 1.30
2. Set power options for processor to100%. To do this go to control pannel, select "power options", select "high performance", then select "change plans settings", then select "change advanced power settings", then select "processor power management". Change minimum and maximum to 100% for both battery and plugged in. This is a temporary work around until toshiba finds a solution.
So far so good for my machine. Hope this helps. By the way this will eat up your battery in about 2 hours.
Jim and Lynn M

I talked to Toshiba. They advised me to jack up the processor to 100%, but you are correct. Its a workaround while they "work on a fix". The problem is between the ATI card and the AMD processor.


I also have an A215 series laptop and the solution to that is to set your performance / power settings to high performance all the time.

it's turning it's display off because some of the processing needed to display images are not available when not in high performance.
Toshiba Satellite laptop goes into black screen without warning? - confirmed

Sound

Ubuntu 7.10 have to old sound (alsa) drivers, so I switch to Fedora 8.

To enable sound you need edit /etc/modprobe.conf and add model=toshiba to end of line.

This file should look like this:

alias eth0 r8169
alias scsi_hostadapter libata
alias scsi_hostadapter1 pata_atiixp
alias scsi_hostadapter2 ahci
alias snd-card-0 snd-hda-intel
options snd-card-0 index=0
options snd-hda-intel index=0 model=toshiba

More information: HDA - ALSA Wiki