Laptop Randomly Shutting Down and Slow

[acme54321]

My laptop has been acting up for the last 9 months but now I finally have time to try to solve the problem. Its a Dell Inspiron 5100 and it takes forever to boot up, is really slow after it finally boots and randomly shuts down (I think form overheating).

Specs:

Dell Inspiron 5100

2.66GHz P4
512Mb Ram
32 MB ATi Vid Card
30 Gig HD

Random shut downs: Seem to be caused by overheating. Fan is going all out and it is still hot as crap. The computer seems to be working much harder than it should and this might lead to the over heating.

Slooowwww: The computer takes way to long to boot, somewhere between 5 and 10 minutes. I'm running XP and thats just not right. Once it has booted up it takes forever to do anything and locks up if you try to do more than 2 things at once. Like running IE and Acrobat at the same time will lock it up. The CPU seems to be doing alot more work than it should/used to before the problems. Like opening a medium size program will use 100% of the CPU. And the fan blows full out pretty much all the time but it is still overheating.

Hard Drive: I'm also getting this message on startup that my HD is failing. That one has showed up in like the last 3 months.

I'm sick of this and am going to just reformat the thing. But last night when I was trying to reformat it kept overheating so I just went to bed. Could a sick HD cause all of this?

Thanks for any insight,

Ryan

 

[Perrupa]

One of my buddies' Dell had an overheating issue that would cause it to overheat after like an hour or so of use. apparently it was a flaw of all inspirons of his model #. he sent it back to dell who basically sent him a new one I believe (he kept his hard drive and optical drive). it worked fine till 3 months later it started doing it again. though I think his was an earlier model than yours.

I would suggest searching the dell forums and/or calling dell to see what the issue may be, and yes it may be the cause of the hard drive.

Peace and good luck

 

[Drucifer]

I'd say you have two problems...


1: Heat... dying/dead fan?
2: HDD... dying.

If you have warranty left on the Dell... contact them. That machine's got some issues.

 

[acme54321]

Yeah, I think I'm going to start by replacing the hard drive.. Hopefully that is the root of all these problems. Is there any brand/type of drive I should look for to replace the Hitachi that is dying?