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troubleshoot old dying laptop (eMachines M5310)

E

eflat123

Member
I have an old laptop sitting in the closet that I presumed dead a couple years ago because it wouldn't boot. No time for troubleshooting and I was ready to get a new lappy anyway. I was going to gather it for electronics recycling this week, when I thought to power it up. Surprisingly, it booted.

It's an old eMachines M1530 w/ an Athlon XP-M. It was running really, really sluggish, like not happy to be alive at all. After about 20 mins, I'm trying to shut it down gracefully and it just dies. I notice the bottom is really hot. I eventually removed the hard-drive and the battery and booted to a diag disk. Eventually it'll die, even if I just leave it sitting at the diagnostics menu doing nothing. And it dies now after just a couple minutes. Now the bottom is not unreasonable warm for a laptop and the power adapter is just a bit warm as expected. And while running the fan is spinning.

I'm wondering a) what may be the issue?, b) is it salvageable?, c) is it worthwhile? Not sure what I'd do with it, but seems a shame to send it to scrap if there's anything left in it...
 
...could be overheating.....

try pulling it apart.. and check the heatsink fan for excessive dust, etc.. and maybe try cleaning up the mount and reapplying some thermal paste....
 
Yeah, I hope it's just overheating. Found a site that had extremely details pics of taking this thing apart, or else I don't think I would've been able to on my own. Just got back from Fry's with some thermal compound...
 
chances are it a problem with the battery though. .if it wouldn't power up at all in the past... If you saw a post /boot screen..and then it powered down after a while. .then heat is a possibility....

the problem is some laptops run through the battery.. so even if the ac is hooked up .. but the battery is defective.. it may not boot... so that could be the ticket.. in which case.. recycle may be in order...
 
Success! Turns out this thing has a well-documented heat problem. Some new thermal grease and blowing out the cat hair from the heat exchanger (which can only be done by taking it apart) seems to have done the trick. Props to Dan East over at the dexplor forums for posting detailed pics back in 2004!

The hard drive, to me, still sounds somewhat off. I think I'll use the system restore disks (remember when they used to actually include sys restore cd's?) and see how the system feels. I imagine this'll eventually go on ebay. It was just an evenings effort and it was satisfying to not have any screws left over!
 
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