Inspiron 1720 Hanging up

Hello there. I've read numerous post on this great Forum, especially about Inspiron 1720 which I have bought about year ago. It's my first post here and I require your help (Wall-of-Text ahead!).

About two months ago my laptop have started hanging up after I quit from a gaming session, but not immediately. Usually I can barely start browsing web or watch a movie before it hangs up completely and does not respond to any commands. Back in the summer when temperatures were high my laptop did the same but because it was overheating (since then I bought Zalman cooling pad and a can of compressed air to keep it clean - and that did the trick). However this is not the issue this time as all the temps (according to I8kfanGUI 3.1 [I have set fans to work as fast as possible at all times] and CPUID Hardware Monitor) are well below 70C (they are usually around 65-68) which from what I know and read on those forums are well within safe operating parameters of both CPU and GPU. After it became utterly annoying (and running Dell diagnostic utilities [both those from BIOS and pendrive] to no effect) I returned my laptop to the shop I bought it from (it wasn't under Dell's warranty anymore but under the shop's [best to my knowledge it was unused after-display laptop with a nice price tag on it, from some shop in Denmark which according to Dell's databases was shipped there in 2008]). I returned it about 4 days before end of the warranty. So I waited a week till they got around to look at it, and spent second on a phone with a tech who was ensuring me there was nothing wrong with it in the first place. They returned it and promised to take it back within a week if problem persisted. I boot it up and VOILLA ! everything is working nice and cool. I figured they opened it up, took apart and put back together and some dust bunny shorting something out have fallen off. That was three weeks ago. Now I again face this problem. Haven't called the shop yet to ask the tech what exactly he did during that week he was taking care of it (something must have worked). So I'm asking you now for your expertise. Additionaly I have tested the memory the old fashioned way by pulling out one chip and booting up system on the second (and vice versa) without any hitches. I also tested memory with Memtest_x86 from Hiren Boot CD suite (intalled on a bootable pendrive) left it for a night without detecting any errors.

Finally here are my specs:
CPU: INTEL Core 2 Duo CPU T5550 @ 1.83GHZ
BIOS: A09
RAM: 2 GB (dunno what type exactly) 2x1024MB.
HDDs: 2x500GB
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT (or rather GTM cause this is laptop and all) 512MB
OS: Win 7 32 bit edition

Please help.
Cheers

A guy from Poland

 

Have you running Dell Diagnostics? A failing drive could be the reason for hangups.

Also if you shipped it to Dell right before warranty, you should have called them up right afterward and try to setup another RMA. I would have extended the warranty if you know you had some sort of intermittent problem.

 

I had run Dell diagnostics. Nothing came up. And the shop isn't Dell's. As far as I know they have no store in my country. And there was no possibility to extend the warranty.

I also suspected the HDD so i "threw out" the 250GB that was installed when I bought it (it had a system partition) and threw in 500GB that was occupuying second HDD bay and there I threw in a brand new 500GB (not before buying 1TB which doesn't fit). More than that, I got both HDD's and hooked them up on friends PC, then installed Windows on both of them and tested (ran Crysis etc.) so I believe it may be other hardware that is at fault.

Could some loose socket or connector inside cause this ? Not that I'm shaking my machine much, (just travel from place to place), but could something like that happen ?

 

Hm. A computer locking up. What websites are you surfing on? I hope you use some decent antivirusprofilactics. There are sites out there giving your computers all kinds of nasty diseases.

Ok, that was my try of being fun... ...You DO have an antivirus, right? If so, I'd like to know wich one. It is hopefully not one of those 30-day free trial ones? They have a tendency to screw up more than doing good.

 

Avast (it's v6 now, I think). Been using it for years on my desktop and on my lappy since I got it. Never had any trouble with it. Do you think it may be actually a software issue rather than hardware ?

 

Sorry for double post and self bumping but could these issues be related to thermal paste or those heat "pipe-thingies" going bad ?