xps1330 overheating?

Hey,
I'm having A LOT of problems lately with this pos (see sig for specs).
The thing kept on slowing down when browsing/watching movies/playing OLD games (warcraft 3 basically).
What happens is that from boot till now cpu idles at 100%.
I've scanned the pc, I got rid of services. Nada.
Today was even worse, the pc got extremely slow so I rebooted, then in the vista lóading screen it took ages (about 10 minutes), sometimes it would turn off before vista even finished loading, I couldn't even get into safe-mode.
So, I let it cool off, and turned it back on after an hour. Everything was fine then but after playing a short game in warcraft it started acting up again.
I'm using Vista Home SP1, I basically turned off all the useless services and startup app. turned off indexing VAC etc.
My temp are (HWmonitor): CPU: 65, Mobo: 60, GPU: 85, HDD: 45
Note: Sometimes I carry my laptop in my backpack to uni and tend to forget that it's in there and when coming home I tend to trop it from around 5-10 cm height (rarely happens) but I thought it might have to do something with this.
But then after noticing these weird hangups I'm thinking this pos is just overheating. As I'm writing this everything is EXTREMELY slow I can't even open the task manager properly.

 

are those idle temperatures?
if so, they are quite hot for idle.

Did you mean you have had it turned on in your backpack ?
Because sounds like the harddrive has received a few knocks and thats what is causing any hanging.

I believe the Dell BIOS has a harddrive scanner in-built?
Try do a scan and see what result you get.

 

It sounds like a software problem, not a hardware problem. Is it the case that you can't boot into safe mode at all, or only sometimes? If you can get into safe mode, I suggest you run a thorough virus scan of the system.

If that doesn't turn up anything, I would also suggest that you clean out your computer for any dust and other debris, which can hamper the efficiency of the cooling system.

 

@TonyZ
no I just set the pc to "enegergiesparmodus" (I guess that's hibernate but I'm not really sure) when it's in my backpack.
It's weird, I just attached my external HDD and the CPU idle % dropped quite a bit.
How does my external hdd have anyhting to do wiht vistas performance??
@Bog
I was able to enter safe mode yesterday evening but I couldnt enter it this afternoon

I'll try the HDD scan it'll take a bit I reckon since booting up takes up 10 minutes alone

haah


...

 

Hmm, even if your temps seem a little high, they shouldn't be the problem behind this slowdown.

Does the Fn+F8 diagnostic help?

 

There is no heating problem. As Bog said, it's a software problem. You said yourself that something is making your processor run full-load all the time. Thus, your "idle" temp isn't really an idle temp, it's a full-load temp and it looks fine (for a full-load temp). If you run your processor all-out all the time, the machine is going to heat up. Furthermore, the slowdowns are not related to heating, they are related to the fact that something else is taking up all of your CPU power.

Open up the Task Manager when the processor is doing full-load. See what's taking up all of your processing power or take a screenshot.

 

Diagnostics check didn't come up with anything (at least while I was looking, the pc shut down after the test so I'm guessing nothing went wrong).

It's usually the apps that I'm runningiwhich take up about 50% of the cpu load.
Ther other is mostly explorer.exe or svchost.exe

 

Okay, after attempting to format the pc it kept on turning off so I unscrewed the back part of the PC to see that the gfx fan wasn't spinning. I then noticed a HUGE (and I mean HUGE) cotton ball stuck in one of the fins, basically preventing the fan from moving (the thing was almost solid).

All is well now, so I guess I was right with the overheating !

Anyways, I have a new problem now. I want to create a 2nd partition next to my OS partition but the problem is that my lappy already got shipped with 3 partitions (OS, Mediadirect, Recovery and then there's another 118 MB partition). I can only have 4 primary partitions so no dice there but what are the 118MB allocated for??? Could I just format it? Will I lose anything?

 

bumppppppppp

what is the small partition and how do I get rid of it (can I?)

 

just unpartiton everything & create 2 partitions when you setup windows..

 

But I don't want to lose the recovery files and the mediadirect partition.
Any way I can just remove the small partition?

EDIT: Ah, it's the partition with all the diagnostics tools.
Okay, so the 2,5 GB partition is the media direct partition I reckon.
The files in the Recovery Partition are on the DVDs as well right?
Is it possible to recreate the Recovery Partition in the future?

Okay, maybe a mod should lock this thread I'll just create a new thread with an appropriate title since the original problem has been solved.