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Hoping to satisfy a small but vocal group of frustrated customers, Toshiba has unveiled yet another software fix for its 5005 Series Satellite notebooks.

The version 1.7 BIOS update released Wednesday should correct the performance problems of a small percentage of the 5005 Series' S504 and S507 models, says Oscar Koenders, Toshiba's vice president of product marketing. It is the notebook's second major fix since February.

The fix corrects a thermal algorithm in the notebook's BIOS, and will ensure that the notebook runs at full speed, Koenders says. He declined to offer more details, saying Toshiba prefers not to disclose proprietary engineering information.

Software that resides on all Series 5005 notebooks will automatically notify owners of the version 1.7 BIOS update the next time the system connects to the Internet, he says. It is downloadable from Toshiba. Koenders suggests all 5005 Series owners install the update, even those who have not experienced problems.

Slow Response

As reported in June, a small but growing number of 5005 Series notebook owners were complaining to Toshiba about an apparent glitch that causes the unit's 1.1-GHz Pentium III desktop processor to slow dramatically during intense computing. The problem renders the performance notebook nearly useless for some tasks.

After receiving what they characterize as little help from Toshiba, these customers began posting their stories to several online users groups, including Toshiba5005 at Yahoo Groups. Many wrote to PC World. Some blamed the performance hit on Toshiba's fix for a previous 5005 Series problem.

The earlier fix, released in February, corrected a cooling-system problem that caused some notebooks to shut down in use. Toshiba says the original problem affected less than 0.5 percent of all 5005 Series owners, and that the performance glitch hit even fewer. Koenders says the two issues are not related.

Frustrated but Hopeful

Satellite 5005 owner Michael Shane Bivens says he's hopeful Toshiba's latest attempt at a fix will work, but admits he's skeptical.

"I'll try it--anything is reversible," he says. Members of the different online user groups will undoubtedly give the fix a solid workout, he says. "I'm sure there will be quite a bit of discussion, and we'll be testing it like crazy."

A vocal online critic of Toshiba's handling of the Series 5005 issues, Bivens says he's returned his notebook for repairs three times since purchasing it in February. He says he had to do without it for close to three months, but he continues to experience problems.

Another BIOS update sounds good, but the only way Toshiba can truly fix the problem is to substitute the CPU or replace the whole notebook with a newer model, he says. Toshiba phased out the current systems in March, after introducing notebooks with Intel's mobile Pentium 4 chip.

Bivens also doubts Toshiba's claim that less than 1 percent of all 5005 owners are experiencing problems. Too many people are complaining online about problems for this to be a minor issue, he says. He also suspects it could get worse. As users load up their notebooks with more CPU-intensive applications, they too may have problems, he says.

The End?

Toshiba's Koenders, however, is confident problems will cease with the BIOS upgrade, which he says should fix any and all performance issues.

And while he maintains "more than 99 percent of users never experienced a problem," he says Toshiba always took the notebook users' complaints seriously.

"The issue we had was we had a very small number of users reporting," he says. It took some time to isolate the rare problem and solve it, he says.

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