Does anyone here REALLY know laptop hardware?

[deep]

I have a foreign made (Austria, of all places) laptop that keeps shutting down due to overheating (I believe) that I would like to have someone take a look at.

The fan works, but doesn't seem to come on after the initial spin-up while booting. If I blow air through the fan vent, it does not shut down.....seems pretty conclusive to me.

If you think you can do something, reply here or PM and we can work something out.

Thanks.

[ProfessorChaos]

lesson learned....only buy laptops made in china/taiwan.

[FastFokker]

Is it new? Could it be dirty inside?

When the fan is on, is there actually airflow, is the air coming out quite warm?

If you are reasonably competent, take it apart and perhaps the heatsink is not connected properly, or perhaps you will notice something not quite right in the heat dissipation system.

[deep]

lesson learned....only buy laptops made in china/taiwan.

Not exactly a helpful post. The laptop was free, worked for 7 years without incident. If you can come up with a better value proposition, I'd like to see it.

Anyway, I expect that even notebooks manufactured in Europe use common parts. I just don't know about them.

[FastFokker]

7 YEARS!?!?!

Holy crap.. it's surely dirty then. Needs to be cleaned out.

[deep]

Is it new? Could it be dirty inside?

When the fan is on, is there actually airflow, is the air coming out quite warm?

It's older (PIII 650 I believe), but I've taken it apart and cleaned it. The air that comes out during startup feels normal - warm but not insanely hot. I THINK the problem lies with a thermal sensor or fan controller or something, as it just doesn't turn on after that initial spin up.

[FastFokker]

http://img247.imageshack.us/img247/5756/66661pp.png

Woah nice one!

Yeah from the sounds, it's some kind of cooling system problem then. Can't offer much more advice than to bring it in somewhere for servicing, or to rig up a special cooling blower from outside the laptop, to improvise you blowing through the machine.

Unless of course, you enjoy blowing! :lol:

[champ91]

http://img247.imageshack.us/img247/5756/66661pp.png

Woah nice one!

Yeah from the sounds, it's some kind of cooling system problem then. Can't offer much more advice than to bring it in somewhere for servicing, or to rig up a special cooling blower from outside the laptop, to improvise you blowing through the machine.

Unless of course, you enjoy blowing! :lol:

only get it fixed if it's under 100 dollars. otherwise buy a new one.

[Aero]

Have you checked the windows settings, if its not the dust in the fan/heatsink. It could be the fan settings. Might as well try that outif the previous suggestion did not work.

[Aske001]

I had this same problem with a high-end Toshiba laptop (for anyone who thinks that Japanese-made must be better). Fan came on while booting the BIOS, so clearly working, but then shut down and never came on again while CPU overheated in normal Windows operation.

The problem turned out to be that automatic fan operation required a special Toshiba driver for Windows, and it was lost when someone previously installed a generic WinXP Pro update. After much hunting around on the Toshiba web site, we found and re-installed the Toshiba power-management utilities, and normal fan operation was restored.

[deep]

I had this same problem with a high-end Toshiba laptop (for anyone who thinks that Japanese-made must be better). Fan came on while booting the BIOS, so clearly working, but then shut down and never came on again while CPU overheated in normal Windows operation.

The problem turned out to be that automatic fan operation required a special Toshiba driver for Windows, and it was lost when someone previously installed a generic WinXP Pro update. After much hunting around on the Toshiba web site, we found and re-installed the Toshiba power-management utilities, and normal fan operation was restored.

Very interesting idea - I don't THINK that's it, as it worked just fine for quite some time with Windows XP on it, but I'm definitely going to go check that out. Thanks for a good idea.

[stuff352]

check the bios , i believe the p3 had a low power setting (speed step or something like that). It basically underclocks the cpu - less speed = less heat(hopefullY)