random black screen

[alaska98]

I own a toshiba satellite m305d-s4829 laptop. recently it's been doing the following: Touch pad freezes for a couple seconds, screen turns black but remains backlit, computer is still on, but I can't do anything other than reboot.

Only thing different is I have been using a Verizon wireless broadband card. Any suggestions?

Sounds like a VGA problems - over heating of the vga card. I had the same problem with toshiba satellite M70 (centrino 1.8ghz). The VGA chip cannot be removed or replaced. Only solution was to replace the motherboard & that was expensive!! Sold it (dirty cheap) as spares to a repair shop.

[cguan_77]

Only thing different is I have been using a Verizon wireless broadband card. Any suggestions?

so you mean if not using the above card everything works fine?

[alaska98]

It would seem so. It started doing it after I got the card, but I only get on my coputer to use the internet, so could be coincidental.

You could test it by doing the following:
- Connect to another source of internet (ethernet or dial-up) without the Verizon wireless broadband card.
* if everything is working fine, the problem is with this card
* if not, the problem is with overheating / vga

** if it's still under warranty, you could get the hardware problem fixed!

[temp-account]

I had exactly the same problem. random black screens, backlight still turned on, laptop (toshiba satellite P100-341).
Unfortunately, so far I couldn't find a solution anywhere on the net.
However: I installed Ubuntu 10.04 (dual boot) and - NO MORE BLACK SCREENS, AT ALL!
Ubuntu is running smoothly and fully operational, no blackscreens whatsoever. so it's definitely not the videocard or the power inverter.
booting up windows (7 x86, btw) again: random black screens.

Hope this info helps and anyone will find a solution one day.