Laptop problem (Sorry quite long)

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c@luvr

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Hey guys, a lil help sil-vous plait?

Basically I have a 3 year old hp laptop that was working fine up until a few months ago when sometimes it would 'stall' on the hp start-up screen (the one covering the POST). It got more and more frequent until it got to a point where it just didn't get past the HP screen anymore, and stalls immediately so that you can't get into the BIOS.

I've switched the HDD to a new blank one, tested it with other RAM, reseated the processor, cleared out the heatsink fan (which was FULL of dust...eugh)..and am officially outta ideas. I managed to get into the BIOS once and restored that to default and that still didn't work.

It did once load into the 'booting from cd-rom' screen when I put in an OS disc.....then stalled again.

Refused to load that screen after that.

I reset the CMOS and took the laptop to pieces at the weekend, and it actually loaded quite nicely, managed to install windows, and sat on msn for a couple hours chatting to people during which the mouse started to stutter...it gradually got worse, with processor usage going up to 100% at some points (resulting in the laptop locking up), even tho it was just running a fresh Windows XP install along with MSN (I had updated it to SP3 too). It got worse and worse where I had to keep rebooting, with it sometimes failing to load past the HP screen (as before) and now i'm back to square one with it dying on the HP screen again. It must be some software/bios issue surely as the actual laptop ran nicely for at least an hour and a half.

Does anyone have any ideas on anything else to try?

Thankilies :)
 
There can be namy causes of this behavior - the one i find it most common with the symptoms you are tallikng about is when you have baked your processor if it wasn't getting coold enough it sounds like a serious possability.
 
Thanks for your quick reply, I've switched it with another identical spec processor and it does the same thing. So can't be that..
 
Dust plugging up the heatsink is most likely what killed it after hours of over heating. Is the fan still working?
 
Its a HP nx6110, and yes the fan is still working. All the hardware is as far as I know, because it ran for a good 2 hours after I put it back together again ...before it started locking up at 100% cpu usage...
 
Since you tried a different cpu and still have problems, it could be the Intel chipset chip went bad. I had a Toshiba that wouldn't boot because the fan went bad. The hard drive led would stay on at the moment it locked up. I opened it up to replace the fan and found that the Intel i845 chip had no heatsink and relied on air flow to stay cool. With that poor design I never bought a Toshiba ever again.
 
I was looking at the laptop again last night, taking it apart, and I noticed that the fan seems to be spining the 'wrong way' I.e. it spins in the direction of the curved fan blades rather than against them...if that makes sense. While holiding the keyboard off the laptop, the laptop does boot up (albeit slowly) and I can manage to just about get into windows now (but if I replace the keyboard it hangs again) which makes me think the processor is overheating. I also noticed that the fan kept cutting out at things like the windows login screen, causing it to lock up. I looked in the bios and there is no fan speed and temp thresholds to change...anyone know how I change these on the laptop as I think this will solve the problem :D

(P.S. thanks muchly to everyone who has helped so far, I'm slowly getting there :)....you can tell this girl has nothing better to do on her evenings than take computers apart... :p)
 
I have a utility that works on many Dell models that controls fan speeds. I have it set to keep the fans running continuously. In your case such a utility wouldn't help since Windows has to be fully loaded for it to work.

Try using Arctic Silver on the cpu. If the laptop is worth keeping, replace the fan. If it were me, I would go one step further and find a continuous source of voltage to power the fan continuously rather than let a temperature sensor control the fan.
 
Yeah I do and have used arctic silver :)

Saxon, you said there are many causes of the problem...are there any others you can mention for me to try and solve the problem? Thankyouuu :)
 
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