Dell vostro 1500 locking up

I've had my laptop for about a week, and it's been running fine off the AC power.

I tried running it off the battery (fully charged obviously) and it foze up within 10 minutes. What happens is the screen totally locks up, and the hard drive makes a clicking sound, and nothing responds at all except for the power button.

I reset and changed the power settings from high performance to balanced, but it froze again soon after.

Reset again, froze after 5-10 mins.

Plugged in AC and booted up and again in froze in about 5 mins.

I reset and it's lasted about 10 mins so far.

Does anyone have any possible causes or solutions? (running vista btw)

Speedfan is reporting my temps as:

HDD 42C
Temp1 53C
Core 0 33C
Core1 34C

I'm tempted to send it back to dell, how quickly are they likely to get it back to me? (standard 1 year warranty)

Thanks

 

Probably a bad hard drive. Boot into Knoppix and run "fsck -cvf /dev/sda{main partition number}". Also try running "dmesg" to find out the hard drive OEM and then download a test program from the OEM.

 

What would be the benefit of that?

 

fsck is the *nix disk repair option. It will show all disk errors and give you the option to repair them, unless you use the -Y option (at least that's what it is in solaris), which will automatically repair them all, or at least attempt to.

dmesg will give you the disk information as described above

 

Ok thanks, what makes you think it is the HDD?

One thing I have noticed is that everytime it has crashed, the temp1 on speedfan has been > 50C, which leads me to believe it's overheating. I have no reason to think it's the HDD (it makes a single click about a second after it crashes.)

 

with new comps, at least the ones my family gets, freezes like that are usually caused by the HDD

those temps should be fine.

I don't think speedfan is the most accurate on a notebook