Laptop Troubleshooting Help

[In2Photos]

A family member asked if I would check out a laptop for them. It is a Toshiba Satellite, S55t-A5334. It stopped working in September of 2018. She told me that she thought the power button didn't work. When I received the laptop I plugged it in and let the battery charge for a few minutes. I then pressed the power button. The light around the button began to flash every 5 seconds or so. I dug around on the internet and didn't find much that matched what I was seeing. Most of the other posts were about 5 flashes only, but mine didn't stop. I found out there is a battery reset button so I pressed that and the power light stopped flashing. Eventually I got the laptop to do something but it went straight to a weird blue screen. I tried again and this time the laptop booted into Windows, but shortly after another blue screen but the code went away before I could copy anything down. At this point I thought it might be memory related so I removed 1 stick. The laptop booted again and didn't crash. So I put the stick back in to see if that was the issue. The laptop booted fine again and for the next 8 hours Windows ran fine, doing update after update. I left the laptop on all night.

The next day I planned to run some stress tests but noticed a whole bunch of bloatware on the machine so I decided it would just be best to do a fresh windows install. The install went fine. At this point I decided to do some stress testing. I ran Prime95 for about 3 hours and it ran flawlessly. I went to shut the machine down and move the laptop to my dining room. It hung while shutting down, then as I set the laptop down it blue screened for like 2 seconds before turning off and the power button began flashing again. I left the laptop alone for a day and started back at it again tonight. Same thing as when I first started. Had to use the reset button several times, but nothing worked. So I took the back off and unplugged the battery then tried to boot the laptop with just the power cord, but nothing, didn't even get a light. I plugged the battery back in and the laptop booted right up. I decided to test the memory and ran Memtest with 1 stick of RAM at a time and it passed fine doing 2 passes each.

I'm not sure what to test next. I wondered if there was a hard drive issue since it crashed the one time I moved it. I did run a scan on the drive, which is a spinning drive still, and it showed no errors. I do have an SSD for it, but didn't want to put it in until I knew if the machine was good to go. Any ideas?

 

[VirtualLarry]

At this point I decided to do some stress testing. I ran Prime95 for about 3 hours and it ran flawlessly.

On a laptop? Especially an older one? That's a bit dangerous, don't you think?
15 min on a laptop, at most.

 

[Steltek]

Set Windows to write kernel dumps and install Whocrashed to analyze the dumps to try to determine a cause for the errors. If Windows was already writing crash dumps, it can analyze the existing ones to give you some leads. You also might try checking the Windows Reliability History to see if something in particular is crashing.

With the flashing power button, I'd suspect that the charger is bad, the battery has a bad cell (or is close to end of life), or both. You might check in the BIOS to see if it has a battery test feature.

 

[In2Photos]

On a laptop? Especially an older one? That's a bit dangerous, don't you think?
15 min on a laptop, at most.

Why is it dangerous? Especially if it was already considered dead? It ran fine, CPU temps were low 80s the entire time.

 

[fralexandr]

It's dangerous because of heat, since there tends to be dust caked in the hsf, dry paste and possibly dry heatpipes. Since you monitored the thermals and it didn't shut itself down it should be ok.

To verify if it's the hard drive:

Did you try chkdsk /r to see if there are bad sectors? That would indicate a bad hard drive.

A better way would be to run a program with SMART to check the hard drive.

Comparison of S.M.A.R.T. tools - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

I've used speedfan and speccy before.
Aida and crystaldisk are often used by tech sites in benchmarking storage, but can display SMART data as well.

Otherwise, as mentioned above, since the laptops pretty old you might want to look at the battery and charger

 

[In2Photos]

It's dangerous because of heat, since there tends to be dust caked in the hsf, dry paste and possibly dry heatpipes. Since you monitored the thermals and it didn't shut itself down it should be ok.

To verify if it's the hard drive:

Did you try chkdsk /r to see if there are bad sectors? That would indicate a bad hard drive.

A better way would be to run a program with SMART to check the hard drive.

Comparison of S.M.A.R.T. tools - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

I've used speedfan and speccy before.
Aida and crystaldisk are often used by tech sites in benchmarking storage, but can display SMART data as well.

Otherwise, as mentioned above, since the laptops pretty old you might want to look at the battery and charger

I ran SFC but not chkdsk. I'll do that tonight and check the SMART info as well.

 

[In2Photos]

OK, SMART info shows everything is OK. Chkdsk shows that it made corrections to the file system, looks like under Stage 3 Examining Security Descriptors. Here is how the rest of the night went.

I tried to turn on the laptop after being off all day. It wouldn't come on, same flashing lights. I tried with the power cord connected and disconnected. I tried with the battery unplugged and the power cord connected. I tried with another power adapter that had the same size plug and voltage rating but slightly less amperage. No luck. I checked the output of both adapters and made sure they were at 19VDC. The only thing different today from yesterday was that I had installed both sticks of RAM. I removed one stick and it booted right up. It's been running fine since then, including running the checkdisk. It runs fine on battery and with the adapter. I can install either stick of RAM in either slot and it runs fine, but if I install 2 sticks I start having trouble. Each stick is 8GB. This is really weird.