Hel80 Trouble

Hi, I've had my Hel80 for over a year now. I used it a lot for gaming and other stuff like school work and such. The games I really only played on it was World of Warcraft, Counter-Strike Source, and Warcraft 3. For all these games I ran them on very low settings. Even with low settings my laptop would shutdown (due to heat) without it elevated with a fan blowing on it, or on my cooling pad with a fan on it.

With that, it's been fine for a while, however, just recently i ran into a "SMART Failure Predicted on Hard Disk" error. I tried everything and could now get it to even get into windows. So I RMAed the hard drive and received a new one. The hard drive installed fine and I installed all my software and such. The laptop ran perfect for one day and then when I turned it on the next it gave me the same SMART error.

I can run Ubuntu (linux) on it from a Live CD just fine. With the new hard drive, I can install Windows to a certain point before it just fails. I can't imagine the problem being a brand new hard drive. My thoughts are it had something to do with the motherboard or cpu. Perhaps a bios flash can make a difference? I really don't have experience in that area though.

I don't really need it to play games on anymore since I just bought a desktop, but I need it for college and I really don't have a lot of money to buy another computer. If anyone has any advice on what to do I'd appreciate it. Thank you for reading.

 

Why are you so sure that the heat is reason your comp would shut down. How much were the temps? I'm asking because, HEL80 is a pretty cold notebook and playing Warcraft 3 on low settings shouldn't make it shut down. I believe I played it on high settings with no problem.

 

Well the notebook was getting pretty hot and when I put the fan on it and with elevation it stopped shutting down, so that's why I came to the conclusion it was heat.

 

Hace you tried cleaning out the fans?

 

Yeah I always try to keep the fans as clean as possible. The real issue though is not the overheating but the SMART error I'm getting. I basically can't install windows on it or really do anything.

 

Have you run a chkdsk on it? It may help with the SMART error.

It's also possible you got a bad HD the second time, try RMA it again.

Third time's a charm perhaps?

 

Yeah I ran all those checkdisk and hard drive utilities and they all say bad sectors and such but can't fix them and end up just freezing up.

 

Sounds like another bad HD. I suppose it could possibly be a bad HD controller, but would suspect the second HD first. I'd send it back and go for a third..

Good luck!

 

Thanks for all the info and advice. I sent the RMA request in and they will send me another HDD soon. I'm hoping those 2 other hard drives were the problem, but I'm not holding my breath. I have a feeling it is the HD controller, and in that case I need a new motherboard.

Where can I find a new mobo for the hel80?