Computer behaving badly !

[Daffy D]

Over the years there have been many threads and even more "solutions" on here about computers behaving badly.

 

Mine is a little different so thought to share as it might help someone at sometime.

 

Some time ago I bought a basic cheap computer for about 10K baht for my daughter from a well known delivery company that many on here use.

 

At first all was well but after some months the computer started to act up, sometimes it would not boot up though it worked fine the day before, then the  the monitor would stay blank and sometimes it would just shut down for no reason.  

 

Several times I had it on the bench and swapped out the memory, the power supply, graphics card, cleaned up connections and anything else I could think of, and each time it would work again for various lengths of time before it started to play up again.

 

Anyway long story short it turned out to be a broken clip on the CPU heatsink that failed to hold the heatsink firmly onto the CPU.

 

Each time I had the computer laid flat out on the bench the heatsink would flop back into place on top of the CPU so nothing was visibly amiss, and the computer would work again for a while till it slipped off again causing the overheating CPU to shut down.

 

So if you have a computer behaving badly just give the CPU heatsink a tweak to make sure it is firmly attached to the CPU

 

In my case I was lucky that the motherboard had some holes where the broken heatsink was clamped that I was able to use by threading through a couple of cable ties and with a good dollop of thermal paste strapped the heatsink back onto the CPU.

 

Have not had any more problems since.  

[KhunBENQ]

Heat is a main killer for PC in Thailand especially when used in hot/non AC rooms.

Additionally a lot of dust/dirt might clog the airflow.

"Core Temp" is a useful utility to monitor CPU temperature.

To my displeasure Firefox heats up the CPU when playing youtube videos, not so for Chrome.

[johng]

10 minutes ago, KhunBENQ said:

To my displeasure Firefox heats up the CPU when playing youtube

I have a bad problem with Firefox  too if I have more than 2  tabs of Thaivisa open at the same time all 4 cpu's

are going at 90% plus !!!

 

11 minutes ago, KhunBENQ said:

Additionally a lot of dust/dirt might clog the airflow.

  Spinning fans can attract a lot of dust..Thailand seems to be very dusty,  so unless  you like cleaning fans every month or 2  it might be better to look at passive cooling and/or large slow fans.

[Beggar]

I use the Freeware Speedfan. Warns me of CPU heat problems even at core levels and problems with fan speeds. Also controls the CPU fan speed and the speed of other fans. Also monitors the temperature of my hard drives. A lot of settings are possible. Great software. But needs a little bit understanding of the hardware. 

[Daffy D]

A good free program for information and monitoring your PC is "Speccy"  http://www.ccleaner.com/speccy

 

[Daffy D]

A free program to control CPU usage on selected programs.

 

http://mion.faireal.net/BES/

 

[Daffy D]

Reduce the flow of dust into your computer.

 

If you have a computer case with a grill for fan that has fairly large holes, you can reduce the flow of dust by sticking a section of laundry bag cloth on the inside to filter the amount of dust getting sucked in.

 

You will be amazed the amount of dust that is normally sucked into the computer that collects on the outside, just brush it of every couple of days.

 

Be sure to ask the wife before cutting up one of her laundry bags. 

 

[OneMoreFarang]

Many PCs show the CPU temperature in the BIOS without any additional programs.

Start the PCs, go into the BIOS (often DEL key) and look at the temperature.

A typical sign for this problem is also that maybe the PC works for some time and then it cashes. And then when you open it again it crashes a lot faster because it's still hot.

 

 

[bendejo]

I had a Fujitsu laptop that apparently ran hot, but didn't get any noticeable effect while using it.  But when I tried to turn it on in the morning it wouldn't.

Opened it up, poked around a bit and eventually discovered condensation in/around the CPU (this was 15+ years ago, can't recall the details).

So afterwards I knew the solution was to open the back and let it dry out, aiming the air conditioner blower at it helped.

Eventually the thing's USB bus fried, sold it for parts to one of those guys in the back of the upper floors at Panthip, got 300b for it.