VGN-FE890 extremely hot/overheating

I'm pretty sure this has to be a common problem but so far I haven't been able to dig up substantial information about it, although I've found scattered evidence. Just over the 1 year mark and the 1 year warranty expiration for my Vaio VGN-FE890, it started running dramatically warmer, and when running intensive programs it would get extremely hot. Specifically, it's the right 2/3's of the laptop that gets the hottest, with it getting hotter the farthest to the right. The laptop was originally very cool during the first year, so the change was easily noticeable when it happened.

I can easily hear the CPU fan going all the time when it's on and warmed up, sometimes louder/faster than others, so I know it's working. I need to do some testing to be sure, but at the moment I'm not certain if it's the graphics chip that's generating the extreme heat, or if it's the processor, but it's certainly one of the two. It's definitely not the battery or the HD. It's always very hot ever since the change, but it definitely gets dramatically hotter when running processor and/or graphics intensive programs, especially 2D and 3D games (too hot too touch the underside of the laptop). Needless to say, I haven't overclocked or touched the graphics (NVidia GeForce Go 7400) chip in any way.

Not looking for random idle guesses about the source of the heat, I can do that myself, but if anybody is familiar with the problem or owns a similar model Vaio suffering from the same issue I'd be anxious to hear about it. I want to determine if this is a known, documented problem with this model and/or this graphics chip.

Thanks

 

Run HWMonitor. It will give you the temperatures of your CPU, GPU and Hard drive. Also, useful because it records the highest and lowest temperatures during the time the program is running.

 

Thanks, I'll d/l it and see what it has to say. Wish I had one of those temperature guns like they use for measuring tire and track temperature at the races... this thing gets smoking hot. It's particularly hot when running certain, seemingly CPU intensive programs, so I don't think it's the GPU. I can hear the CPU fan so I know that's working, making it difficult to imagine what kind of a failure or malfunction could generate such ridiculously high temperatures and yet not cause any of the components to outright fail. Heck, the Genuine Windows tag on the underside of the case has turned almost black from the ambient temperature.

Anyway, I'll post the results from that program under various conditions, and hopefully one or more FE890 owners can do the same for comparison. I'm just surprised nobody else has posted about the same problem yet, I doubt I'm the only one.

** Follow up **

Downloaded the program and here are the temps that it reports, which are fairly limited:

ACPI
-TZ00 190 degrees F (current), 183 degrees F (min), 197 degrees F (max)
-TZ01 190 degrees F (current), 183 degrees F (min), 197 degrees F (max)

Intel Mobile Core 2 Duo T7200
-Core #0 184 degrees F (current), 179 degrees F (min), 197 degrees F (max)
-Core #1 186 degrees F (current), 181 degrees F (min), 206 degrees F (max)

Hitachi HTS723232L9A360
-HDD 114 degrees F (current), 112 degress F (min), 114 degrees F (max)


I assume ACPI is just another way of reporting the CPU temps, although I don't know why the real-time measurements aren't identical. The program didn't provide any data for the GPU unfortunately. I don't know what the standard operating temps should be for this CPU, but these temps do seem high to me. I ran these tests with pretty much my typical programs running such as Firefox, Outlook and Trillian, and some basic services and programs running in the background, but I keep a pretty clean configuration.

That's about all the info I can provide. If anybody knows of a program that will definitely pull my GPU temps on this model please let me know, and I'd definitely like to see some comparisons from people.

Thanks

 

Well the other day I wanted to replace the worn palm rest on my FE890, which includes the touch pad and mouse buttons. Wasn't sure how much was going to be involved but I knew it would be a fair amount of work. Turns out, after completely dismantling this thing, that the internals are all mounted to the palmrest rather than the bottom, which made replacing the palmrest virtually impossible without a very high risk of one of the very fragile connectors and ribbon cables getting broken or not going back together. Not to mention all the intricate wires that were intertwined throughout the underside of the palmrest. So, after a few hours of dismantling all the components, I arrived at the conclusion that proceeding any further wouldn't be prudent.

The good news is that along the way I was able to thoroughly clean all of the internals, and remove a great deal of dust. In particular, the exhaust vent on the back on the laptop yielded a paritcularly large amount of dust. I had read posts on another forum by ASUS owners who had reported extremely high temperatures, and they had indicated that after cleaning the vent on their Asus laptops, their core temps dropped substantially. Turns out the same was true in my case, although I didn't stop with just the exhaust vent, so I can't say for sure how much that alone contributed to the drop in my core temps.

As you can see from my previous post, the temps of my dual cores were extremely high, and fairly close to the max. operating temps for this CPU. Below are the revised core temps with the same programs running, after a thorough cleaning.

ACPI
-TZ00 138 degrees F (current), 134 degrees F (min), 186 degrees F (max)
-TZ01 136 degrees F (current), 134 degrees F (min), 186 degrees F (max)

Intel Mobile Core 2 Duo T7200
-Core #0 134 degrees F (current), 130 degrees F (min), 183 degrees F (max)
-Core #1 132 degrees F (current), 129 degrees F (min), 192 degrees F (max)

Hitachi HTS723232L9A360
-HDD 103 degrees F (current), 98 degrees F (min), 120 degrees F (max)

Needless to say this was a dramatic drop in core temps on the order of about 25%. I no longer worry about the laptop spontaneously combusting, and I suspect the processors function more efficiently. Bottom line, if any other FE890 owners are suffering from the same problem, or for that matter any modern laptop owners, grab a can of compressed air and give the exhaust vent of your laptop a good cleaning before doing anything else. For FE890 owners, you just need to remove one screw and the vent cover just pops right off.