Old Laptop Issue

[Thorax_the_Impaler]

Hello everyone!


My annual digging through my closet tradition yielded an old laptop; An HP Compaq nc8230. Playing around with it, I learned it has A couple problems. The machine, no matter which OS it is running (Win XP professional and two Linux distros, one lighter that air in a sense) has the following issues:

1. The machine overheats. Badly. This happens mostly in the front of the laptop, particularly around where the ram and wireless card are placed.

2. And, the laptop will at random times, lose all response to everything. The cursor stays in place, the screen will not change and the fans slow almost to a crawl. It locks up completely. And will do so anywhere, in the bios, during a boot, in the middle of a movie (should I get it to stay on long enough), etc.

I've exhausted everything I can think of. I've torn it down numerous times, and cleaned the surprisingly minuscule amount of dust under the hood. I've removed the battery (which was bad in terms of function), and tried it on either AC or battery power. The issues remain constant.

I'm not particularly attached to this machine or anything-----I don't really care if its too forgone to save. But this is intriguing me, because no logical fix I've tried has yielded any favorable result. What do you guys think? Anyone have any ideas on what this could be; or how to fix it? Thanks in advance for your time and answers!

 

[strollin]

Did you try replacing the thermal grease under the CPU? I've seen where the grease has dried out due to excessive heat so cleaning the old and replacing with fresh helped bring down the temp.

It may be that the original design was poor and the laptop has insufficient ventilation due to the poor design.

One thing that you could try is one of those laptop coolers that sits underneath the laptop. They have additional fans to move more air and help keep laptop temps in check.