Laptop - re-applying heatsink and thermal paste and overheating

[jjbtnc]

Have a friend with a laptop that could be experiencing heat problems. It's a Tiny laptop and every now and again (twice in past week) it turns off, not a nice shuts itself down but a straight and complete off, sometimes it manages a beepy scream but this all happens in a split second.

old post of mine that nobody answered http://technologyvault.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,1215.0.html

Anyway all fans are ok and fluff free as far as i can see, not sure what motherboard is being used, i know it doesn't have any temp sensors so can't check that (tried hwmonitor, speedfan, motherboard monitor) i can get a hd temp - ideling at 33 most so far is 45.

Can't think of much else to do apart from maybe check the cpu/thermal grease/heatsink combo. Maybe the thermal grease hasn't been applied very well (have you seen those pics of apple notebooks with compound everywhere but the cpu die !!) or perhaps it was done with a not very efficient compound. I have some arctic silver 5 so i thought it might be an idea to redo the compound.
Anyway being the sort of guy who likes all the info at hand before he begins - i've done desktop cpus loads of times but never a laptop. The manual for the laptop gives vague info about this so i was wondering if anybody had any info or links that may be of help. I realise that all laptop manufacturers have different implementations of thermal management but hopefully there may be something similar out there. i might try some manuals from different manufacturers like Dell to see if they have a similar setop. From memory the setup looked something like this

http://www.intel.com/support/processors/mobile/pentium4/sb/cs-007489.htm

Um...any help appeciated...if i'm not 100% sure that i won'y go ahead but i can't think of anything else apart from heating issues and will all fans working ok and being fluff free i can't think of anything else that can be checked.
The hard drive doesn't seem to be overheating, but maybe the memory or graphics card ? Would the graphics card have some sort of heatsink/pipe thing going on ? One that could be checked ?

Heres a hardware report on the lappy if it's any help

http://www.geocities.com/jjbtnc/laptop.txt

One thing i wanted to be clear on is what type of cpu the laptop has - from the report it's a p4 not a pentiumM - would that be the same pentium4 you get in a desktop or can you get a 'mobile pentium4' ? is it possible to tell from the hardware info text file ? does the cpu type make any difference to the method of re-applying the thermal compound/heastsink ? Also got this from an intel identification utility

Intel(R) Processor Identification Utility
Version: 2.8.20060328
Time Stamp: 2006/06/03 11:27:15
Number of processors in system: 1
Current processor: #1
Processor Name: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.00E GHz
Type: 0
Family: F
Model: 4
Stepping: 1
Revision: 9
L1 Trace Cache: 12 Kµops
L1 Data Cache: 16 KB
L2 Cache: 1 MB
Packaging: FC-PGA2
Platform Compatibility Guide: 04A
EIST: No
MMX(TM): Yes
SIMD: Yes
SIMD2: Yes
SIMD3: Yes
Enhanced Halt State: No
Execute Disable Bit: No
Hyper-Threading Technology: Yes
Intel(R) Extended Memory 64 Technology: No
Intel(R) Virtualization Technology: No
Expected Processor Frequency: 3.0 GHz
Reported Processor Frequency: 3.0 GHz
Expected System Bus Frequency: 800 MHz
Reported System Bus Frequency: 800 MHz
*************************************************************

Anyway thanks for any help

p.s. i might try and get a couple of photos of the cpu heatsink stuff up if that might help

 

[jjbtnc]

Bit of an update -

been googling and found references (although i don't believe everything i read!!) about thermal throttling on p4 cpus and how if it was getting activated then you could be having overheating issues - here's one page i found

http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/104/1 need to look at both pages.

and a few choice quotes from that page

" Average users won't know if the Thermal Throttling is activated or not in their computers. If this feature is activated in your PC, it will run slower and also this means that you have an overheating problem in your computer, which has to be solved. "
" Under normal condition, the "Throt" collumn has to be always showing zero. If it happens to be a number different from zero there, this means that the Thermal Throttling feature was activate and your processor has overheating problems. "

So it seems possible that in the abscence of motherboard temp readouts you could check this throttling feature and it could indicate that you have a heating problem. I tried the 2 programs that were mentioned and here are the readouts

http://www.geocities.com/jjbtnc/Throttle.jpg

and

http://www.geocities.com/jjbtnc/journal.txt

the throttling started after aprox 1 1/2 mins and was constantly on after about 2 mins and to seemingly quite high levels. This would indicate that there heating issues going on but then again maybe it's impossible to design a laptop with a p4 cpu, that even when all heat management elements are working at 100% , will not need some throttling - i don't know

any opinions on this ?