Possible Thermal Issue

I was given a HP N3210 lappy. It was freezing up on the previous owner and discovered that after 45 sec to a minute it would freeze on me. The fan wasn't kicking in but it didn't feel hot. So I got the fan out of the closet and let it run full blast on and I wsa able to keep it running. Now the lappy will run, so I fdisk'ed it and began to install win98. I ran the setup from the cd and the floppy. The system scans the pci bus successfully and then it tries to scan with mechanism #1 - this is the line where it hangs. "Scanning pci bus with mechanism #1" It also popped up with mechanism #2 when I used the cd - weird huh? Then after a few reboots I got it to say mechanism #1 using the cd... Anyone have an idea? I know this thing is probably junk, but I would hate to throw it out.

BTW - At first I thought the freezing was due to the mouse and/or keyboard, so I removed them and used my external stuff, still no dice.

Thanks.

RE: Possible Thermal Issue

You said the thing ran longer with air blowing on it. Make sure the heatsink for the CPU has heatsink compound on it. It may have dried out. If it uses the adhesive pad then carefully remove the pad and use heatsink grease.

RE: Possible Thermal Issue

Under the keyboard there was the steel plate that ran almost the lenght and width of the machine. I'm thinking that was the heatsink or something, but there were 2 screws that bolted into the chasis of the processor. Once I removed that there was no grease on the processor nor any sign that there once was. Should there have been some thermal grease on there? Also it seems like the fan isn't blowing as hard as it should. Does the grease make contact with the steel plate to pass the heat away from the processor?

Thanks.

RE: Possible Thermal Issue

You should add heatsink compound to the CPU if it's dry. I can't say about the fan, you'll need to check that it's getting the right voltage and the speed is within parameters. Sometimes you can check fan speed in the BIOS.

Heatsink compound (grease) assists in heat transfer.

RE: Possible Thermal Issue

Well I added some thermal grease between the cpu and the heat sink. It runs a little longer, but turns out the fan isn't pushing as hard as it could. Also it looks like it is some kind of proprietary equipment, becuase it has part of the case molded into it. I will keep you posted.