Ancient Sony Vaio PCG-K23 question

so I have had this laptop since November 2004 and I think it may be on its death bed now. The computer runs extremely slow even after a format and reinstall of Windows. There is no bloatware on the machine and after the reinstall there was no difference in performance. After a Memtest run I determined the ram was fine. The hard drive was replaced last summer and I haven't found any indications that it may have a bad block or anything. What really gets me worried is that the laptop really likes to shut itself off randomly. Does this sound like the mother board could be near death?

 

I suppose the mb may be going, but this sounds to me like you may simply have an issue with heat. Have you cleaned your machine lately, especially the vents?

 

Yeah I opened it and cleaned it completely. The fan is loud as hell and always on so i am sure there is a heating issue but the fans work properly and its blowing heat out always.

 

Unfortunately the K Series (I'm typing this from a K-23 my self) was well known for excess heat thanks to the Pentium 4 processor and insufficient cooling. The older models (the K-1X line) were well known for overheating and simply breaking when they were NEW

My K-23 has held up adequately since I bought it in August 2004 but I would find it very easy to believe that the heat generated by the Pentium 4 has finally taken its toll on your mb.

 

Heat was exactly the problem with my wife's PCG-K23. We both bought our K23's at the same time, but her's got really slow over the last 6 months.

I installed a new drive with a clean install of winxp (which took forever because of the slowness), with no change. Task manager showed the CPU at 50% to 100% with only the barest of windows running.

On every benchmark test I tried (PassMark™ Software Performance Test V6.0 FREE), her performance results were 10% of mine, and the fan was bad noisy. I took her's apart, right down to the fan housing. It didn't look dirty, which confused me, so I pulled the rectangular piece of black tape off the top of the larger of the two fan housings, and wha-laa. There was a solid block of dust on the downwind side of the fan, packed inside the fan housing between the fan and the cpu fins. I sucked the dust out through the rectangular hole i had opened up, using the hose from our regular floor vacuum (morepower---arrrr). Then sealed the hole back with hi-temp black electrical tape, put it back together, and IMMEDIATELY her's went right back to like it was the day we bought it.

If I can answer any questions about getting into the case, feel free to ask. It wasn't exactly a cakewalk.