need help: acting funky and overheating

I'm afraid my bf's lappy is getting ready to die. Yes, it was the cheapest thing I could find, and yes, it has poor build quality (Dell B120), but it's only a little over a year old! That doesn't make sense. I'm hoping there's something I can do to avert its imminent demise, cause laptops are expensive...

Recently, it's been running sluggishly. Things took forever to open, and videos and mp3s would stutter, making them completely impossible to watch/listen, even when nothing else was open. Then one day, all out of the blue, it just turned off. I touched the thing in the back on the bottom (anyone know what's there?), it was hot! So I sat it on a book to cool it off. It has no feet in the back, so it normally sits completely flat on the desk. When I tried turning it on maybe 10 minutes later, it worked, but I got the message that it turned itself off because it overheated.

As it was on, even when nothing was running, the fan sounded really loud - as bad as my DTR when it's running folding@home at 100%. I was gonna scan for viruses just in case, but I couldn't even install Norton without the installer freezing and the laptop shutting off. So I said, let's format. And I did. And everything was good as new.

That was two weeks ago. Since then, it's been sitting with its back elevated just in case, and also cause my bf got to like it slanted like that (since that's how I kept it while formatting it). However, it's been getting worse. Videos are now stuttering, and yesterday, it overheated and shut itself off.

I've installed AVG after formatting, so I don't think it's a virus. If it was just getting hot, I would try to apply Arctic Silver, but heat is not it, it's tied to something else. Can a dying hard drive do something funky like that? I don't remember if it's 4200 or 5400 rpm, but it shouldn't be hot, esp since the only things he does on that laptop are internet, word processing, and listening to music. But if not hdd, what else would get fixed when the hdd was formatted and as two weeks went by, would go bad again? Also, if the hdd was dying, how would formatting change anything?

Please help

Malia

 

Did you try to clean the heatsink? It must be collection of dust on the heatsink. My Dell 1150 did overheat once, but a person told me to clean the heatsink w/ compress air can. After that, it was running like new ever since. Now almost 3 yrs later, still running smooth, because every 6 months I clean the heatsink.

JC

 

Use NHC, Speedfan, Mobilemeter etc to check temps. This way you'll know if its the cpu, gpu or HDD is overheating...

 

I'll do that this weekend. (I'm currently far far away in school.) In the meantime, - any thoughts on why formatting had an effect?

Malia

 

I'm thinking maybe you have a couple of bad sectors on the hard drive. When you formatted, the data was probably not written to those sectors; instead, it may have gotten put there over the next few weeks due to fragmentation.

You'll want to run an HDTune test when you get it back up. Better yet, if you have a 2.5" enclosure, take the drive out of the laptop, put it in there, and then run scan.

 

Chaz makes a good point. I'd also blow out the fans with compressed air if you can. Those things can get fuzzy and make a huge impact on heat dispersion.