Troubles fixing a laptop.

[shortyg83 10+ year member]

reset bios

 

[Scoobydoo 5,000+ posts]

it could also be bad sectors on the hard drive and once the install gets to that point of the drive to copy the files it freezes. i would try running a chkdsk or some other error reporting utility on it

the shutting down thing sounds like it is overheating

 

[Atimm693 10+ year member]

reset bios

Care to elaborate?

 

[Atimm693 10+ year member]

Well guys, I finally got it running and am now posting from the laptop. Heres the story.

A couple weeks ago I brought this and a couple other computers to a computer shop here in town, two were laptops, one was a desktop. The desktop he fixed, and he said the other laptop (IBM) was shot, and this one needed a new mobo. I parted out the IBM and proceeded to have a look at this one. I swapped the hard drives from this one into the IBM and vice versa. It shut down at 27% while formatting, so I started picking it apart to get the CPU socket type for a new mobo. Once I got to the CPU heatsink, there was a nice thick carpet consisting of eight years of dust plugging up the fins. After i pulled that out, I noticed the thermal compound was dry and old. after cleaning up the heatsink and CPU I put on some Artic Silver and reassembled it.

During this process, I found the GPU heatsink was crooked. On further inspection, I noticed the bolt type thing that held the sink to the board was snapped off. A little super glue later and it was attached normally again. I'm guessing this or the CPU was overheating and throwing the computer into thermal protect, therefore shutting it down randomly.

After this I reformatted and installed XP with no issues, and I also threw in a stick of ram from the IBM bumping it up to 448 MB from 256. Running better than ever now, quiet and cool. I don't know what dell was thinking putting the cooling fan on the bottom of this computer, so it is almost always blocked by something.

 

[andrewmoore13 10+ year member]

Well guys, I finally got it running and am now posting from the laptop. Heres the story.
A couple weeks ago I brought this and a couple other computers to a computer shop here in town, two were laptops, one was a desktop. The desktop he fixed, and he said the other laptop (IBM) was shot, and this one needed a new mobo. I parted out the IBM and proceeded to have a look at this one. I swapped the hard drives from this one into the IBM and vice versa. It shut down at 27% while formatting, so I started picking it apart to get the CPU socket type for a new mobo. Once I got to the CPU heatsink, there was a nice thick carpet consisting of eight years of dust plugging up the fins. After i pulled that out, I noticed the thermal compound was dry and old. after cleaning up the heatsink and CPU I put on some Artic Silver and reassembled it.

During this process, I found the GPU heatsink was crooked. On further inspection, I noticed the bolt type thing that held the sink to the board was snapped off. A little super glue later and it was attached normally again. I'm guessing this or the CPU was overheating and throwing the computer into thermal protect, therefore shutting it down randomly.

After this I reformatted and installed XP with no issues, and I also threw in a stick of ram from the IBM bumping it up to 448 MB from 256. Running better than ever now, quiet and cool. I don't know what dell was thinking putting the cooling fan on the bottom of this computer, so it is almost always blocked by something.

dont all laptops have cooling fans on the bottoms? isn't it the only way they fit?

 

[zack39648 10+ year member]

my vaio has cooling vents but not fans on the bottom,... the cpu is in the far left corner with a fan positioned behind the heat sink on the back it sucks the air and blows out the side

 

[ryan8551226 10+ year member]

it does not take long at all for dust to build up in those heat sinks and cooling fins. The worst is if you have animals that shed a lot

 

[silvercookie 5,000+ posts]

thats dell for you

 

[Terranova 10+ year member]

arf

 

[Atimm693 10+ year member]

my vaio has cooling vents but not fans on the bottom,... the cpu is in the far left corner with a fan positioned behind the heat sink on the back it sucks the air and blows out the side

Idk, i figured it wasn't a very good idea to stick it on the bottom where there isn't much airflow. The fan has a chute on it that blows air through the fans on the heatsink, the dust was in between the heatsink and fan.

it does not take long at all for dust to build up in those heat sinks and cooling fins. The worst is if you have animals that shed a lot

Ran since 2000 without being cleaned, surprised it lasted as long as it did.

thats dell for you

I could care less since it was free. //content.invisioncic.com/y282845/emoticons/tongue.gif.6130eb82179565f6db8d26d6001dcd24.gif

But our older OptiPlex has been running great since 2001 pretty much constantly with zero hardware issues.