R61 Constantly Freezes

Well, I'm back.

My laptop recently started freezing a few minutes after bootup. It got to the point where I could do nothing productive on the machine, forcing me to revert to my desktop for school usage.

I finally had some time to open it up, and figured out the fan wasn't spinning no matter what the temperature was. Nothing blocking the fan from spinning, it would just do nothing. Then the machine would overheat and lock up.

My question is, is this really what I think it to be, a simple dead fan? Or is there another reason why it doesn't spin?

Thanks.

 

The easiest way to find out is to connect the fan directly to a 9V battery and see if it spins. My guess is that the fan is dead.

 

Good call, Steve. I'd check the fan's voltage first though to make sure you don't overvolt and kill it when hooking it to power.

 

You are absolutely right. Please check the voltage rating on the fan ( make sure is ~> 9V) before you do that.

 

Upon further review, the fan spins up as soon as I press the power button, and then it immediately stops. It never starts spinning again.

So, what could the problem be now?

I appreciate your responses.

 

Do you have any third-party fan speed control/temperature-monitoring software installed, like HWMonitor, or SpeedFan? If so, I'd uninstall these to start; you can always reinstall them later. Perhaps one of these is interfering with the fans ramping up as temperatures increase.

After that, I'd check the BIOS to see if there are any options that might be helpful there. If you aren't running the latest BIOS version, I'd upgrade to it.

 

Nope. I did have RivaTuner installed, I might see if I can find a way to get that off.

I looked for any possible BIOS updates this morning. Unless I looked wrong, my BIOS date is later than the one given on Lenovo's site (October versus September).

 

Lenovo just released an updated BIOS for the T61 at the end of April; I would think a similar one would be available for the R61.

EDIT: Here are the links for the R61 file downloads for Windows XP. Most models have either a BIOS from the first week of May, or the last week of April.
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/s...Page.vm&operatingsystemind=53385&machineind=0

 

Hmm, thanks for the link. I guess I'll have to update on Friday night.

The only problem now is making the computer last long enough to successfully update.

 

A failed BIOS update can brick you laptop. I would not do it unless you know it will complete. In The R61 BIOS under "power" you have user selectable settings for fan speed. You may want to see what you have there or reset your BIOS to default settings and see if that corrects your issue. Otherwise you will have to rig some external fan blowing on the heatsink (like a blow dryer on cold setting) and see if that stabilizes your laptop before you attempt the BIOS update.

 

Have you run any spyware programs. You might have some things in running on startup that is preventing the fan from starting and is locking up your laptop

 

Do it with a bootable CD. This way, you won't have to boot into Windows, and your temperatures shouldn't go up significantly unless there's a serious hardware problem. Lenovo makes their BIOS updates available as .ISO images for people who wish to be cautious; I'd just download/burn the file from another machine.

 

start in safe mode to see if your fan works properly. also go to services.msc and see if anything is starting that you dont already know about.