Toshiba Satellite L635 S3050RD Sound problems

This laptop had a sound issue even before a phone charger was mistakenly plugged in to the earphones port (not by me). 

It used to be the sound would degrade into an unintelligible garble at random times. I would restart the laptop a couple of times and it would go back to normal. I would personally hazard a guess that some component is overheating, possibly some component has burnt out.

Now, post phone charger incident, when the pc is off and cold, you get about 5 min. of sound when you power it up, then nothing. It seriously overheats on the bottom right corner, just where the earphone plug is.

Placing a PC fan under the overheated part brings down the temp of the affected zone considerably, the sound even comes on for 2 seconds at a time every now and then.

Hp Photosmart C5180: a history of use

I remember when I unpacked the C5180, an expression of absolute glee on my face. I couldn't plug it in fast enough to try out all its feature! Hp's drawn out driver installation process didn't dent my expectations, the maker of such a beautiful and capable product could do no wrong. It was setup on the network and all its features tried out one by one.

Fast forward to the first cartridge change and the dampening of all that joviality. They weren't exactly cheap, and didn't last all that much. Delight only returned once a CIS (continuos ink system) was bought and installed about 1 year later.

The installation was not without its hiccups. The lack of any form of guide didn't help. Handling ink can be a messy business. The system consists of dummy cartridges with a pipe coming out of them and going to external ink reservoirs. Everything came hooked up out of the box, the reservoirs full of ink. All that had to be done was to replace the cartridges for the CIS dummy ones. But theres a latch which hold the cartridges in place which pinched the tubing, so the tubing had to be disconnected, the cartridges placed, latch had to be latched and finally tubing reconnected. The drops of spilt  ink where a nightmare to clean up. Alcohol helped, but not enough. 

Installation aside, the price of 1 HP cartridge now bought me 100ml of ink, the rough equivalent of 8 cartridges. And so the romance continued, now printing between 40 and 80 colour A4 pages daily.

With so much printing, the machine regularly went into an ink sucking cycle. It stroke me as odd that after sucking up ink it would then blow some ink back out. I assumed it was an intricate mechanism in which it sucked ink from all cartridges simultaneously, even though it might only be low on one ink colour, so the blowing was to get rid of the excess of the other ink colors. All this sucking and blowing alarmed me somewhat because it caused the external ink reservoirs to puff up and deflate. They have rubber caps which seal the refilling mouths. I thought of taking these off, but the amount of dirt that accumulated upon every surface told me it wouldn't be long before the printer clogged up. So every once in a while I'd take off these caps and the reservoirs would decompress with a swoosh and some splattering of ink which had to be cleaned up. In time I learnt to do this without looking, covering the reservoir and my hand with something disposable, decreasing the messiness of it all.

One fine day I evidently forgot to release the pressure because the magenta ink reservoir burst, splashing pinkness all over. My white chest of drawers suddenly became a work of art, worthy of Jackson Pollock. Clean up required a litre of alcohol.

Some research finally shed some light on what went wrong. It turns out those rubber caps on the reservoirs were only fitted so as to be able to ship the system ready filled. You are meant to take them off 

and replace with funny double cone plastic filter thingies, which allowed air in and out whilst keeping dirt out.
So the magenta reservoir was patched up with some sealant, and with the funny double cone plastic filter thingies in place, it was business as usual.

Some more happy printing times went by until...

Approximately 2 years after unpacking it, it displayed an error message and refused to squirt another drop of ink. 

"Ink system failure"

After much research, it turned out to be quite a common problem, not only for this model but for the whole photosmart line of HP all in ones. The general consensus was that a hard reset was the only route to salvation, on the C5180 this is accomplished by:

whilst pressing the left arrow and setup keys simultaneously,turn the printer off and then on.

Personally I never managed to turn the printer off with the power button whilst pressing that combo, I would pull the plug from behind. The procedure drove the printer into a prolonged startup routine which seemed to consume copious amounts of ink and took some time. Nobody was complaining as it apparently fixed the issue. For a while at least.

The printer continued to cross the life death divide in that manner for a couple of weeks but in the end it predictably stayed dead. These where times of heightened levels of frustration. Every single combination of words that might describe the problem were passed onto google, and through google the internet was scoured in search of answers.

The first step to printer revival was posted on a blog. On several actually. They explained how to clear the printer's error state without the need to reset it. It involved:

Whilst pressing the left arrow, press the setup key.
The display changes, saying something about a combo.
Press "OK"
Use the left or right arrow to navigate the menu till you get to hardware configuration
Press "OK"
Display says something about clearing error state
Press "OK"
Display says to cancel
press "cancel" to get out of the menu system.

Printer no longer displays error and I can print again. Sadly not for very long before the error comes up again.
My curiosity was tickled. How many more secret menus where there? I started pressing random key combinations at the combo screen and found quite a few. Recently I even found a blog with a combination to access a rudimentary pong game:


Whilst pressing the left arrow, press the setup key.
The display changes, saying something about a combo.

Press up, up, down, down, left, right.

Press OK to start the game.

More to the point, I discovered a special "underware" menu. One of the options in this menu was "boot code". In it you could choose User mode or Mfg mode. I chose Mfg mode and upon rebooting the printer everything went whacky. The display showed the colours of the rainbow, though now you could print! If you pressed the power button the display changed to a black background with a criss cross of white lines for a while and then you got your normal blue screen, only now it said Mfg mode along the top, it didn't display the ink gauge and said "ink thresh hold exceeded, don't ship the unit in its current state".

The copy buttons didn't work in this mode, and after a good bit of printing I realized it didn't do the ink loading cycle either! So when the prints started to come out faded, I had to switch back to User mode, wait for it to do the prep cycle, after which it displayed ink system failure again, and switch back to Mfg mode. It was rather cumbersome, but it worked. The printer had a new lease of life, till the next problem.

The next problem was that it stopped sucking up black ink. All the other inks worked fine, but for some reason, the black wouldn't budge. I resolved to take it to the place from whence I got the CIS, HP, let it be known, where of absolutely no help with any of the problems ever experienced by this printer. I told the techies from the CIS place about the ISF (ink system failure). They had it for a couple of days after which they said they didn't have a clue. So I picked up the printer and tried it out again for the sake of it. It wouldn't work in User mode due to the ISF but it did the prep cycle and the black ink problem was no more. I can only assume that the CIS guys gave it a thorough cleaning and removed a clog somewhere.

At some stage, when I'd changed the printer to User mode for it to load some ink, it finished the prep cycle only this time there was no ink system failure! The problem seemed to have magically gone away. I managed to use it for a couple of weeks like this, the way it was meant to be used, but it didn't last. A few days a go the ISF popped its head through the door again, so back to Mfg mode it went.

Every once in a while I would check the internet again to see if there were any new developments. And one day there was. I found a blog that described a permanent solution to the problem. It seems the ISF is caused by a blown capacitor in the printer's main board. The culprit capacitor is green, manufactured be TEAPO, not all boards are the same. My one has one blown 680 microFarad capacitor rated at 6.3 Volts, but I've heard of others with a 330 microFarad TEAPO capacitor rated at 10 Volts. The general consensus is that if its green, and if its made by TEAPO, then there's a good chance it will blow out if it hasn't already done so. I haven't got around to getting it changed yet, but I have high expectations.

Meanwhile, the printer has stopped sucking up yellow ink, so colour images are coming out in a blueish hue. After I get the capacitor changed I think I'll be taking it for a good cleaning, see if it returns to its former glory.