Dell overheating problem?

[phil24_7]

My darling gf has a lovely little Dell Inspiron 1525 that seems to have a little overheating problem.

It started after the original 250Gig hard drive failed and they sent a replacement 320Gig drive. It only used to happen whilst watchind films through the hard drive (so graphic intensive stuff) so we started to raise it off the ground when we were doing this, by putting a couple of cd cases under each side (we watch films from the hard drive through the tv)

This was fine for over a year until it started getting worse, and has now got to the stage where it overheats quite regularly unless you hand the laptop off the side of the sofa, or some how hold it off your lap or allow the majority of the underside access to fresh air!

As you can imagine this is a PITA.

Any ideas what is wrong or how we can fix it?:confused:

Regards

[barwel1992]

Gf's does the same, i took the casing off it and got the hover on it around thefan and vents, seem'd to help but still does it.

[munkygunn182]

It doesn't resolve the problem, but Belkin do a "tray" you sit your laptop on. It plugs into a free USB socket and is fitted with fans and helps ventilation. I know a lot of people use these to cure Xbox 360 overheating issues, so they must be reasonable. Aside from that, if you put the laptop onto power saving mode, or whatever it might be called on yours, it shuts off everything it doesn't need and produces less heat as a result. Worth a shot!

[fizzwheel]

+1 on the Belkin tray. We got one for Liz's laptop as it was putting alot of heat out.

Wont fix the root cause of it though, as said above, check that all the vents etc arent blocked up with dust and fluff.

[hongman]

+2 for the tray.

I have a Dell XPS M1330 which I used to play games on in bed with the laptop resting on the duvet, and it overheated a lot, til eventually the graphics card burnt out. Luckily a warranty jobbie.

Got one of those trays, problem solved.

A lot of laptops run very hot regardless due to the space constriction, some more than others due to design.

Have you checked to see if maybe one of the fans have stopped working also? A possibility.

Just to give you an idea, at idle, with no graphics intensive stuff running, my XPS graphics card runs at 78C :s

[anna]

When cleaning the fans in your computer by hoover or can of air jobby, remember to put a pencil or something to stop the blades from spinning as this can break them.

[barwel1992]

^ erm never heard of that? the fans spin up at about 1200rpm+ any way, some of my pc fans spin up to 5000rpm much faster than the hoover makes them spin.

[timwilky]

I have a Dell M6400 with a house brick size power supply, You just know all that power consumption has to be turned into heat. who needs an electric fire Not me. I need a power station of my own.

Surely laptop designers are supposed to be knocking out high efficiency, low energy consumption devices. However, we have to realise laptops are a compromise. If we need oomph, we need high power and therefore hot components.

[metalangel]

Yeah I've been told that too, don't let the force of the air cause them to spin while you're cleaning. Over time the heat sinks and fans will get clogged with dust and you need to clean them.

My Macbook gets scorchio if you're playing a game on it, the bit by the vent and also some areas of the underside can get almost too hot too touch. But switch the game off and it's barely warm a minute later!

[MattCollins]

... it overheats quite regularly unless you hand the laptop off the side of the sofa, or some how hold it off your lap or allow the majority of the underside access to fresh air!

Any ideas what is wrong or how we can fix it?:confused:

Regards

Laptops, despite there name, should not be used quite so literally. The fix is to get it out of her/your lap onto a hard flat surface.

[phil24_7]

Cheers for the advice guys, I will look into a belkin tray doobery, as well as getting a can of air (can't believe I will be paying for a can of air! :shock:).

MC, using it on a flat hard surface makes little discernible difference to how quickly it overheats!

Is it easy to upgrade laptop fans to higher flow versions???

Regards
Phil

[hongman]

Most of the time its not how fast the fan can spin, more a case of how the air is circulated. If the air flow of the laptop is badly designed, not much you can do about it really.

Personally I wouldnt be using a can of air if I wasn't opening up the laptop to do it, you'd risk pushing the crap further into the laptop.

I would however turn the can or air upside down and have fun freezing things ;)

[phil24_7]

Surely a better fan will increase airflow, even if it's slightly restricted or turbulent?

The laptop will be getting opened right up, so was looking at doing the fans at the same time.

[andrewsmith]

One cause of overheats on the dell's is the motherboards cook themselves.

The dell desktops we used in me last job were notorious for eating motherboards and powerpacks, the cause was eventually tracked to the lack of ventilation

[barwel1992]

Surely a better fan will increase airflow, even if it's slightly restricted or turbulent?

The laptop will be getting opened right up, so was looking at doing the fans at the same time.

fans in lap top llready spin around 2500 rpm, the problem with faster fans that are small like that is you get a very irritating high pitched wine from them.

if you want to go OTT on it then rip it apart get the mother board out take all the heat sinks off and get some artic silver 5 thermal paste on all the chips that come in contact with the heat sink IF the heat sink screws on, if the heat sink i suck down then it prob's uses thermal pads and to be honest they are cr&p but hard to replace with somthing else because they hold the whole cooling system on to the mother board.

also make sure you wipe over the fan blades as the dust WILL be stuck on them, the more weight on the fan the slower it will spin also the CFM(cubic feet per minute) rating of the fan will be much lower and those small fans have a pittifull CFM rating any way.

[MattCollins]

New fans are a bit premature. There is a good bet that the cooling system is jammed full of lint.


One cause of overheats on the dell's is the motherboards cook themselves.

That is another possibility. I know first hand that at least a couple of the Dell laptop designs have the potential for problems on the northbridge and graphics that will force a thermal slow down. It seems that once they start acting up then that is it for them.

[phil24_7]

Was just gonna upgrade the fans whilst I had the thing in bits giving it a service! How easy is it to replace fans on a laptop?

Will be cleaning the heatsinks and fan inlet/outlet on the weekend and will look at using Arctic Silver paste as I have some left over from a desktop build.

[MattCollins]

Some are dead easy. One or two screws and the fan drops out. Many need the keyboard, screen and top cover removed.

[markc123]

If its suddenly started with the HD upgrade, I would guess that you now have a faster spinning drive then the laptop was designed around, which will generate more heat.

A word of warning - make sure the laptop is off when you use the air duster - i have seen several here decide to spray fluid out if used at the wrong angle :-)

Do the air clean first, if loads of dust comes out then you might be onto a winner without a major strip down. I work in a feed mill, so have rather too much experience of dust and associated heat issues :-)

[phil24_7]

Looks like my weekend is fully booked now!

Cheers all.

Regards
Phil

[beabert]

^ erm never heard of that? the fans spin up at about 1200rpm+ any way, some of my pc fans spin up to 5000rpm much faster than the hoover makes them spin.


As if! 1000watt vacuum fan vs 5watt fan. If that was the case we would all have dinky pc fans in our vacumms. Cant see a few seconds doing any harm though anyway.

Rip it apart clean all the hair and crap from heatsink ducts. Then if you want to go further get some ocz freeze paste for the CPU and/or GPU, it was the leader and better than artic silver last time i looked.

[barwel1992]

theres more to it than how power full the fan is ;) like -/+ air preasure eather side of the fan to changes how fast the fan can spin. the air is been draged through the fan so theres no load on the fan blades because they are no pushing the air if you see what i mean

[phil24_7]

Problem solved. Took the heatsick out, but found no dust/lint as expected but had a poke around and saw a build up of dust/lint in the actual fan housing. Stripped the entire laptop to pieces and removed the fan, gave it a good clean and started reassembling. At this point I noticed the paste on the heatsink was well past its best, so set about cleaning it off and applying some arctic silver paste. Once finished I finished putting everything back together and gave it a trial run and all seems well. Now to try some graphic intensive stuff to really give it a workout!