- Joined
- Dec 16, 2001
- Location
- VIctoria, BC, Canada
Hi guys,
A friend of mine has a ginormous DTR notebook. It has a 130nm Athlon64 3400+ CPU in it.
A while back, it started randomly freezing, and one day wouldn't turn on at all. So she sent it in to a shop. No one had ever heared of her brand before, since she bought it in Australia, so she had to ship it across Canada. When it got there, they told her the RAM had come loose, and didn't charge her anything except for shipping.
She got it back, it worked for a day or so, and started doing it again. I turned it on, and it got halfway through a post, registered 2 MB of ram and froze. I rebooted it, and this time it started just fine and worked. Later it froze up again and wouldn't start.
The shop had said there were no "void warranty" stickers, so I opened it up myself. The RAM seemed perfectly seated, but I removed it and put it back in. The computer started, so I decided to run some tests.
I put on Memtest86+. It locked after 31 seconds. No reds, but a solid lock. Also, at this point the fan came on (screamer) and it was just blasting hot air out of the back, so whatever infinite loop it was stuck in was sure working the CPU out well.
I thought maybe it was a heat issue, so I restarted the laptop, and put on CPU Burn. It froze after not long as well. The weird part was, I had my finger on the heat pipes as I ran CPU burn. It got hotter and hotter, but the fan just didn't kick in, and finally it froze. I also managed to burn myself, it was that hot!
The problem seems clear, it is overheating. So I went and got a house fan, pointed it at the open back of the laptop, and ran CPU burn again. It ran for hours just fine, and the CPU fan DID come on. I have no idea why it didn't the first time through. Even with the CPU fan and the house fan, that heatpipes were hot enough to be uncomfortable to touch! 3400+'s DO NOT belong in laptops damnit!
Now that the heat problem was temporarily solved, I ran Memtest again. It worked fine and I went out for a while. I just got back now, 2.5 hours later, and it is still running just fine, on its 11'th loop. I thought I had figured it out. CPU is overheating, may have even been damaged. Then I though, better test to see if maybe loose RAM did have something to do with it.
So I started wiggling the RAM a bit. Not much, barely even applying pressure. Maybe half a millimeter in each direction, as much as the socket would allow without stressing it. It was fine at first, so I stopped. A few seconds later, I got about 20 red entries in Memtest. I wiggled it some more, managed to coax a few more red errors, then it hard locked.
So basically I am stuck.
One the one hand it seems like its overheating, since it feels like putting your hands near a spaceheater behind the exhaust fan. And it can burn me. Also, CPU burn locked, but with additional cooling ran just fine.
On the other hand, jiggling the ram slightly caused RAM errors and hard locks, and the computer locks even when there is no CPU stress, like POST or something.
I don't really know what the culprit is. Any ideas?
A friend of mine has a ginormous DTR notebook. It has a 130nm Athlon64 3400+ CPU in it.
A while back, it started randomly freezing, and one day wouldn't turn on at all. So she sent it in to a shop. No one had ever heared of her brand before, since she bought it in Australia, so she had to ship it across Canada. When it got there, they told her the RAM had come loose, and didn't charge her anything except for shipping.
She got it back, it worked for a day or so, and started doing it again. I turned it on, and it got halfway through a post, registered 2 MB of ram and froze. I rebooted it, and this time it started just fine and worked. Later it froze up again and wouldn't start.
The shop had said there were no "void warranty" stickers, so I opened it up myself. The RAM seemed perfectly seated, but I removed it and put it back in. The computer started, so I decided to run some tests.
I put on Memtest86+. It locked after 31 seconds. No reds, but a solid lock. Also, at this point the fan came on (screamer) and it was just blasting hot air out of the back, so whatever infinite loop it was stuck in was sure working the CPU out well.
I thought maybe it was a heat issue, so I restarted the laptop, and put on CPU Burn. It froze after not long as well. The weird part was, I had my finger on the heat pipes as I ran CPU burn. It got hotter and hotter, but the fan just didn't kick in, and finally it froze. I also managed to burn myself, it was that hot!
The problem seems clear, it is overheating. So I went and got a house fan, pointed it at the open back of the laptop, and ran CPU burn again. It ran for hours just fine, and the CPU fan DID come on. I have no idea why it didn't the first time through. Even with the CPU fan and the house fan, that heatpipes were hot enough to be uncomfortable to touch! 3400+'s DO NOT belong in laptops damnit!
Now that the heat problem was temporarily solved, I ran Memtest again. It worked fine and I went out for a while. I just got back now, 2.5 hours later, and it is still running just fine, on its 11'th loop. I thought I had figured it out. CPU is overheating, may have even been damaged. Then I though, better test to see if maybe loose RAM did have something to do with it.
So I started wiggling the RAM a bit. Not much, barely even applying pressure. Maybe half a millimeter in each direction, as much as the socket would allow without stressing it. It was fine at first, so I stopped. A few seconds later, I got about 20 red entries in Memtest. I wiggled it some more, managed to coax a few more red errors, then it hard locked.
So basically I am stuck.
One the one hand it seems like its overheating, since it feels like putting your hands near a spaceheater behind the exhaust fan. And it can burn me. Also, CPU burn locked, but with additional cooling ran just fine.
On the other hand, jiggling the ram slightly caused RAM errors and hard locks, and the computer locks even when there is no CPU stress, like POST or something.
I don't really know what the culprit is. Any ideas?
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