A client recently tossed a laptop at me and asked that I try to fix it. The root issue? Her company’s contract IT guy had setup some security “stuff” on it but forgot to tell her what her password might be – and then he disappeared!
So, now she had a nice paperweight. Being ever pragmatic, she simply switched to another laptop and benched this one for a year or so.
Not knowing what I was getting into I took the laptop back to the home shop along with the original manufacturer recovery CDs. It had been so long since she’d last used this machine that there really wasn’t much concern about recovering anything from it.
Got home, plugged it in and fired it up. Thankfully, no BIOS passwords or 3rd party stuff, just an XP log-in password. I looked closer and realized he’d put her in a Windows Domain. OK, well that’s easy enough to fix… meanwhile, while I was admiring the XP login prompt the fan on the laptop was getting louder and louder – and suddenly the machine shut off.
Curious.
I fired it back up but this time with a Ophcrack boot CD to go get that missing password. And again, after just a couple minutes and escalating fan noise, it shut itself off.
Clearly we have an (over) heating issue!
I pulled things apart and confirmed that there were no dust-bunnies gumming up the works. Airflow was good and the fan clearly moved air. I then removed the heat sink, carefully cleaned off all the old thermal tape (which now was like a crusty clay) and applied a bit of Arctic Silver 5 paste that I had in the parts bin and then put it all back together.
Booted it back up and made it about 10 minutes that time. I was actually in the midst of the recovery CD routine when it died. Awkward.
So modern OS’s manage modern CPU clock speeds right? Slow ‘em down when not in use, save power and heat, etc. etc. With that as my operating theory, I tossed in an Xubuntu Linux boot CD I had on the bench and fired it back up. 5 minutes later the Boot from CD process had finished… and the fan noise was going away. Sure enough, once the OS actually loaded things were fine. In other words, the CPU clock speed was reduced and ran cooler.
On a whim, I went ahead and installed Xubuntu from that boot CD. It worked great since the installer runs from the boot CD environment. No risk of overheating.
Problem is, I can’t make it through the XP recovery without overheating! I guess this thing is destined to remain a Linux machine for now. Oh well…
Side Note: For those curious, the laptop is an Averatec model 6240. A bit of searching will show that these things have quite a rep for heating issues!
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April 6th, 2009 
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I have had overheating issues with a lot of different brands I have had. From Acer, Dell, and HP to even Apple. I think some of it has to do with what programs you are running and the battery. It always seems to start getting very hot when the battery starts getting old.