Help required please, for friend's laptop problem

John Doe · 1 May 2009 at 00:58

All of a sudden, a friend's laptop has started to make a really loud noise. It sounds like a fan (although much louder than usual) and occurs mostly when booting or under mild load. If it's any help some of his software programmes have started to slow down or freeze too.

I'm still a complete beginner when it comes to computer hardware, so I told him I would ask you guys. Could it be his CPU cooler? These are some of his specs from what I remember (if it's any help):

HP Compaq nx9420
ATI Radeon X1600
T7200 2GHZ
2GB ram
Hitachi 250GB hard drive.

Many thanks for any suggestions as to what it might be, or how to remedy it.

killari · 1 May 2009 at 01:00

The very first thing I'd do is to check the HSF for dust and clean it with an air duster.

John Doe · 1 May 2009 at 01:09

Thanks very much, will do.

Audigex · 1 May 2009 at 02:48

It may well be that the bearing has worn away, although that doesn't look like a particularly old laptop (about a year if it was expensive, 6 months if it was cheaper?) so that shouldn't be it.

The dust sounds about right, but cleaning out a laptop HSF can be a bitch. I'd advise, once it's done, to put some tights over the intake in some way to act as a filter.

With the intake being under the case, they tend to just hoover up whatever dust is on the desk: I've cleaned mine once a month since I started using a desk at uni; at home it would sit happily on my lap for 12 months at a time.

killari · 1 May 2009 at 03:25

Gave mine a good cleanout today

Went through it with an air duster then replaced all the thermalpads with a decent TIM.

I built the lappy with a barebones kit, wonder why I didn't change the northbridge and gpu pads when i built it :eek:

In any case its running 10 degrees lower at idle now

John Doe · 1 May 2009 at 09:54

Thanks again.

Audigex · 1 May 2009 at 16:14

One thing we completely ignored:

Go download CoreTemp and see what sort of temperatures it's running at.

We missed out step 1 - find the problem, and skipped to 2 - solve the problem

For reference mine is running between 55/57 and 60/63 on the cores at about 50% load (Hl2 is using exactly 50% for 1 hour, the rest of the PC is basically idling) and will go up to about 75 if I run HeavyLoad

Semi-idling it runs at about 45 (running firefox and spotify, around 5% cpu usage) dropping to 40 as a low.
This is in a fairly warm room and it needs a clean, but it does have a 3-fan cooler underneath.

CoreTemp will also give a maximum temperature (85 on mine). If your mates laptop never goes higher than 10C below that max, and is generally 20 below while doing stuff and 30C below at idle (or more) then it's probably not the heat.