Toshiba and its help desk

Today I also want to talk about Toshiba's help desk.

I got this notebook from work, not by choice! Not that it is not a good one, it is pretty fair.
It is a 64 bit computer so you would assume it would come with a 64 OS. It didn't!

I got the vista 64 and installed it. lots of drivers missing, graphics didn't work, etc....

So I went to Toshiba's support website and selected the model (Toshiba satellite pro p200 psp...) and found out that there is not a single 64 bit driver provided from the manufacturer. The funny thing is that when I went to the ATI (graphic card's manufacturer) website to find the driver, they redirected me to Toshiba!

So I called Toshiba's help desk. Someone who I think have never heard what is "64bit" answered and started browsing Toshiba's website for me behind the phone!!! as if I can't do that myself! She told me: "I can't see anything here". Of course you can't, if you could, I would not have called you!!!! I am very displeased with Toshiba's help desk and sadly I don't have a choice.

Any way, I applied all the updates from Microsoft and magically, through update the proper drivers were installed. (happy ending!, see my previous blog)

I miss my Dell.

Installing Fedora 9 on Toshiba Satellite Pro P200 and having trouble with monitor settings

So I wanted to install Fedora 9 on my Toshiba Satellite Pro P200-JS5. It comes with two hards which makes it ideal for a dual boot (Fedora/Vista). Its also good to know that the computer comes with mobile ATI Radeon HD 2400.

Right from the beginning when I selected the GUI installation, when it wanted to switch to GUI the monitor acted weird as if a white liquid starting to fill all the screen until it all went white.

I restarted the installation and this time went with text mode. No problem! Everything went smooth. When I restarted the system, I got the same problem again!

After discussing this with an expert friend I found out that apparently this is because fedora is using the wrong frequencies for the monitor, so I tried finding out what are the proper HorizSync an VertRefresh for /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Section "Monitor"
Identifier   "Monitor0"
HorizSync    30.0 - 85.0
VertRefresh  58.0 - 62.0
EndSection
Section "Device"
Identifier  "Videocard0"
Driver      "radeon"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device     "Videocard0"
Monitor    "Monitor0"
DefaultDepth     24
SubSection "Display"
Depth     24
Modes "1400x900"
EndSubSection
EndSection

which didn't work. So I started googling the problem, no luck. I fiddled around the set up and tried many different configurations, nothing worked!

finally I said to myself, the heck with it, let me apply the updates and just go with text mode:

$yum update

I applied around 25 new installs and around 400 updates and my fedora was updated from 2.6.25-14.fc9.x86_64 to 2.6.26.5-45.fc9.x86_64.

I rebooted the computer and there you go, everything worked perfectly as if nothing was wrong right from the beginning.

So friends, before wasting your time for 2 days fiddling around things to fix on a new install, first apply the updates. Lightning may strike!!!!

Cheers...