Ticked Off/Overheating

[redearthws]

My less-than-average pc knowledge has left me at a loss for where to go to, so I came here. I currently own a M500 Gateway laptop, found here.

Intel Pentium® 4 @ 2.14 GHz
NVIDIA GeForce4 420 Go 32M
512 MB ram

I'm running XP Home, currently.

PCMark2002 results, for what it's worth:

CPU: 5280
Memory: 4241
HDD: 356

It overheats at the drop of a hat (%#@*ing P4's). Norton Professional starts scanning and about halfway through, the whole thing shuts down. I can be running Photoshop with a 5mb file, and the fans will kick in.

I got an Antec NoteBook cooler for Christmas, and much to my dismay, didn't seem to remedy the problem.

A bit of history - I bought this laptop around November of 2003, and together we journeyed to rural China for four months. I lived in an apartment that had about a 30,000 ton pile of sulphurous coal outside (you can only imagine how much was in the air).

I don't want to clock down, and don't want to deal with a thermal grease mess...I'm starting to learn more video editing, and need the horsepower. HELP!

 

[IlllI]

i dont think the notebook cooler helps to cool the processor. i think all it does is help cool the bottom of the laptop

 

[amol]

Originally posted by: skunkbuster
i dont think the notebook cooler helps to cool the processor. i think all it does is help cool the bottom of the laptop

yeah i got this thing a while ago and it DEFINETELY DOES NOT help

is the lappy still udner warranty?

 

[TheCanuck]

Download mobilemeter and look at your CPU temps: http://www.geocities.co.jp/SiliconValley-Oakland/8259/

It's pretty much the only program out there that will show CPU temps for laptops. If you look in the options for it as well it should show what temp the CPU will shut down the laptop. I'd guess about 85 to 90C.

One thing that you can try doing is blowing out the heatsink fins with compressed air. I've done this on a couple of Sony Vaios with similar problems and blowing out the heatsink stopped the overheating (don't worry it's perfectly safe to use a can of compressed air -- just make sure the laptop is off when you do it!). Next, I'd check to make sure you don't have a trojan / spyware maxing out the CPU. Open up task manager and see if there are any processes causing alot of CPU usage (then run the standard adaware, spybot, hijackthis etc programs).

One last thing you can try (if none of the above works) is opening up the laptop, removing the heatsink and old thermal paste (or pad it thats on there), clean it and the processor die with 91% alcohol or higher and then add a thin coat of arctic silver. But I just noticed you don't want to deal with the thermal grease mess.

To properly get rid of all the dust you may need to open up the laptop and hit the heatsink / other components with the compressed air from some different angles.

 

[Gil554]

Recently delt with something similar. Things were so choaked up from dust there was very little air flow. As TheCanuck said, perhaps opening things up and using some compressed air might take care of a significant part of your issue. Just dont stick the straw from the air bottle into your laptop at a fan junction and blow in! That'll just throw a wrench at the monkey...or however that goes! Good luck...G