Dell Inspiron 1100 overheating

[bmetman]

Everyone,
I have a customer's Dell Inspiron 1100 laptop that is overheating. I checked the cpu fan and it is free of dust and is spinning freely. I have even reapplied the heatsink compound between the cpu and heatsink to no avail. My question is can I have a bad heatsink? Is that even possible? Can the fan be spinning @ a lower rpm than it is supposed to? (I doubt it but just thought I would throw it out there). Or am I looking @ a defective cpu. I would appreciate any other tips. It is a celeron 2.4ghz running windows xp.

 

[NYJimbo]

Yes it can be the fan. If you can use one of the many cpu monitor programs out there to check rpm (or maybe in the BIOS) you can tell how fast it is turning. You then have to check what a new fan's rpm turns at. We have seen this happen quite often in desktops and a couple times in laptops.

Problem is that laptop fans tend to be a little pricey so you want to be sure of the RPM's before you go yanking it.

I dont know if that machine can be overclocked but you might want to check that too.

 

[ootuoyetahi]

Common problem with Dell laptops

Dell is notorious for having laptop fan problems. There is a simple program out there created by irritated dell customers to fix the problem.

Check here for the download: http://www.diefer.de/software/i8kfangui31.exe

and here for the homepage: http://www.diefer.de/i8kfan/index.html

 

[bmetman]

Thanks,
NYJImbo the cpu is not overclocked I already checked. Sorry I didn't mention that. I think I have cpu-z and coretemp laying around so I will give them a try. It's amazing how after a long day the simple things slip your mind. Ootuoyetahi thanks for the link to that tool. I did find it was a common problem but I did not know that tool existed. I already downloaded it and it will be making its way into the toolkit.

 

[bmetman]

Thanks to those who posted. It was the fan. I have never seen it spinning but at a lower rpm than designed. Usually I see it so caked w/ dust that it burns out. I've learn something new. Thanks

 

[NYJimbo]

Thanks to those who posted. It was the fan. I have never seen it spinning but at a lower rpm than designed. Usually I see it so caked w/ dust that it burns out. I've learn something new. Thanks

It's funny because right now we have a desktop machine in the shop that acts as a mail filter for several large domains, it runs Freebsd and suddenly has started crashing this week around 3:15am. That is the time that this machines runs a back-end process called "daily" which churns the hell out of the machine. That's the only time it crashes, so I rebooted the box and went to the bios and see the fan is spinning around 2300rpm but should be around 2800 (large blade, slower rpm fan) , so the cpu is running hot but runs very hot during the 3:15am process and the machine boots. It probably cools slightly during the boot and the process (which is cron'd) doesnt start up again, so it wont die until the next day. I dont feel like working on it this weekend so I commented it out of cron and the daily just wont run for now. Tommorow I will replace the fan and re-enable the job in cron.

Just another thing we have to worry about in these crazy machines.

ps- same thing happens to those stupid high-end video cards.