I went to a local PC repair shop on thursday in pursuit of degraded laptop batteries to build an electric bike with (disassemble battery, assemble larger, higher voltage pack with good cells.) The guy working the register gives me a Toshiba satellite P205D-S7802 he thinks has motherboard issues since it runs for a little while then turns off. Getting home, I put hiren's boot cd in and watched it boot. At the  shell option screen the laptop turned off. Smelling hot hardware, I turned the laptop over and saw the stationary cooling fan. Taking it apart thinking it was a bad fan, I took the motherboard out and removed the fan, touching the blades in indifference when a screw fell out of the fan assembly. I plugged everything back in (reassembled laptop without case: [link] ) and it ran fine.  I guess I now have a laptop that works.
How the hell does this happen?