Laptop is overheating.

B

BallerX

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jan 17, 2003
Messages
1,611
I have just been recently given a dell inspiron 5150 laptop. It has a major heat problem.:(

It is a 2.66 ghz P4M.
I currently have speed switch xp setup and handling the cpu speed. I notice that I have to run this laptop at 1.6Ghz all the time and the fan is still going ninety to nothing. If I set it to max performance scheme it immediately heats up to 70+ C and throttles back to 1.6.

This gets pretty annoying. It is not that fast of a laptop to begin with.

Do they make after market cooling solutions for laptops?
First thing tomorrow I will take this thing apart see if it is full of dust and I will reset the heatsink with AS5.

The problem is, I have taken a look with my light and it does not look dusty at all. So either the heatsink is not making good contact, or as I suspect, the cooling solution just doesn't have the balls to cool this thing. It is a P4 after all.

Any ideas?
 
the user who had this unit before you may not have paid any mind to trying to keep it running cool. once you pass a point of no return, anything you do to keep it running is simply delaying the inevitable. at one point the heatsink and fan was perfectly capable of cooling off that cpu, but too many instanced of having the exhaust vents clogged with bedding or too few cleaning attempts will irrevocably damage the main board until we get where you are today.
 
i would also bet its a combination of dust clogging vents deep inside and thermal paste that has dried up.

i have even taken apart 1 year old dell laptops and cleaned off all the factory paste, reapplied with just some regular generic stuff and the difference was night and day. its pretty scary how poor the factory heatsink paste can be, but its true.
 
Well, I took it all apart and I have some good news.
Problem 1. The fan was caked with dust and funk. Cleaned dust and funk fan spins freely.
Problem 2. The heatsink was clogged with cat hair. Removed fan and used compressed gas to blow the clogged cat hair out after I removed most of it with tweezers from the fan hole.
Problem 3. the heatsink compound was severely degraded. Cleaned and replaced with AS5.

Prognosis. Machine now functions correctly. :p it stays at around 40-60 C. Now I can play TF2 in a 640x480 window perfectly. The processor now remains at 2.66 when needed otherwise I have seen it as low as 50mhz
 
that's usually the common situation.

I cleaned out a 17" laptop and I found bread crumbs inside, some hair, and a finger nail!

Non-tech people seriously do not take care of their electronics....
 
even if you do take care of your stuff, most of us arent lucky to live in dustfree homes. that and the factory paste, whatever that stuff is, i think is designed to break down after a couple years... its a good way to get people to upgrade.
 
I found an app that lets me run the fan at full speed when it is on external power. Now it Idles at 28C and load is never over 50c. We are good to go now. Its called I8kfanGUI. I got it from the same website where I got speedswitchXP. These two programs work better for this laptop than speedfan.
 
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