Check Toshiba's site for updates - could be a display driver problem. Others have the same issue on the notebook forums.

Well, I now have a new laptop. I ended up doing some research on this issue and it seems that Toshiba has been having an ongoing issue with what many, many people call the ''black screen of death". It is a very, very common and repeating occurrence with Toshiba Satellite laptops, especially the A215 series. Luckily for me, I was within the 14 day return period for Best Buy and brought it back to them this afternoon. I told them what has been happening and told them I wanted to exchange it for another brand (the one I had wanted all along, actually). Long story short, they gave me a full credit for what they determined to be a "defective" computer (which saved me the 15% return fee they usually charge) and I walked out with the one I wanted all along - the one I'm typing on right now, actually.

We'll see how Vista works on this unit, but to be honest, I'm not too worried about how much RAM it takes because this unit has 3GB of RAM installed!! Plenty! :)

Hehe, still going downhill. I warned ya!

I hope the one you wanted is trouble free.

Dave

Thanks, Dave. How was Mammoth? I saw your picture on Motion's thread.
(I'm bummed. No ski days yet this year, but a week coming up next month).

Snow was great, weather started to move in, we left early. It's about 1.5 hrs. each way.

From what I've heard, Vista is designed to use a large memory footprint initially, apparently it's slightly more efficient. Also, just because that 1GB is ALLOCATED, doesn't mean it's being USED. Just means Vista has set it aside. As soon as you start opening other programs that need the memory, Vista's allocation drops (like it should).

I couldn't put up with Vista crashing while trying to do Windows Updates, or any of the other mundane tasks the last 2 weeks has consisted of, so, on a leap of faith, I downloaded Solaris 10 x86 8/07. Works amazingly well on here --that's what I'm typing this message on. The only snag was the 3rd party driver for the Ethernet card, but even that wasn't too hard...found it, downloaded it, compiled it, tested it, and installed it. Voila.

My battle with Vista is over at last...Sorry to hi-jack the thread!!

I've got 4 PC's running Vista, 1 that I'm loading SuSE Linux on right now and a Windows Home Server. No problems at all, everything works just as it should...

My new laptop loaded with Vista has worked beautifully in the five days I've owned it. Not one hick-up so far.

It would take a LOT to push me into the Mac world (I run a lot of special purpose software), but from everything I hear, Vista just might do it...