Overheating smoking fan keeps running

The fan seems to of been running a lot more lately and a couple of nights ago it just shut down dead while I was using it. It would not turn back on, it was dead. A couple of hours later on I turned it back on and as it was booting it started smoking from the front and I had to remove the power cord and the battery to make it stop...very scary so I left it like that till the morning.. In the morning I had the AC power connected and the battery in and it booted and ran fine. I backed up my files to another computer but when I shut the Dell down the fan keeps running very loudly. The machine is off and the fan keeps screaming. The fan stops in stand by mode but not shut down. Now to confuse things a bit more.....If I have the computer running with the AC cord and no battery its shuts down properly, put the battery back in the shut down computer, and the fan starts to scream continously again. Then the machine will not boot with AC only, must have the battery back in to boot.....................whats it all mean somebody please. Oh and by the way, out of waranty, on motherboard number 3, it seems the Dell 5150 is a real LEMON!

 

u might want to take it apart, enough to get access to the heatsink fan and cpu, then do a good cleanup on them first - can air and vacuum cleaner do the job good - and apply new thermal paste on the cpu (AS5 is recommendable).
cleaning helps out most of the time.

cheers ...

 

I would take it to a pc repair shop for them to troubleshoot the problems you are experiencing if trying to clean out excess dust, etc. doesn't seem to help.

 

sounds like you need to clean the dust out of your computer. you should do this every couple weeks to avoid the problem you seem to be having over and over.