Vostro 1500 - problems with overheating and hard drive

Get rid of the dust. If you don't want to do that yourself, you may consider asking a computer repair shop (give them a hardcopy of the service manual of your computer then).

Michael

 

If you want to try a shot at removing the dust yourself, I agree with the keyboard removal. A mini vac would be best, but i have used a brush nozzle on a full size vac. You could also open the ram door and remove the HD caddy to put the vac in those spots as well. Then use the compressed air and see if that helps. If its dust, you should see some temp moderation. At least you'll know that you're on the right track. At that point, you can consider professional cleaning.

You have had this for 2 years ... are the higher temps something new?

As noted, these units are prone to GPU heat issues related to the GPU/heat sink interface. If you clean the computer and the problem persists, that is the direction I would look in. Do you feel the heat anywhere on the case? Is it close to the GPU or CPU (I think the manuals are on line)?

Bronsky

 

I've had the overheating issue on my vostro 1500 with 8600m gt as well. I think the advice from this thread is very helpful and thanks to everybody above. I'll try cleaning and maybe undervolting if cleaning doesn't improve much.

Regarding the HDD noise issue of OP, I'm not sure if this helps because yours is a seagate drive. But for old IBM drives, which is now taken over by hitachi, they have this tool that allows you to directly change the HDD's performance level, from quite & save power to maximum performance. Maybe you shall call up seagate to see if they have similar tools.