i was wondering if anyone else has had this problem. my computer is brand new, about 3 weeks old. it's a toshiba satellite running windows vista. every so often it will just randomly go black on me and nothing I do will make it come back on. I have to do a hard shut off and then restart. my father in law said he had this problem when he bought his laptop and that it is because of vista. has anyone else had this problem? he said once he downgraded to XP it quit doing it. let me know if you need any additional info, I've scanned the computer, it is virus free and spyware/adware ect free. no other problems, just this weird quirk. how much damage will this do to my computer if I keep having to restart it without properly closing windows?

Apparently there's a Release Candidate for Vista Service Pack 1 that you can
download. I'd read the stuff on microsoft web site about it and see if your
problem is in the fixes before installing.

I'm in the habit of never using hibernate or power saver features because
I've seen a lot of problems reported. But I only use desktops. If I had
a notebook I'd prolly look into it in more detail.

The most common cause for this in Vista is corrupted video drivers. Try downloading the latest version from the Toshiba website and installing it on your system (presuming that you can get into Windows to do this).