Laptop fault hardware or software?

[immortality]

Hey guys,

Getting weird problem on my laptop ,it's randomly loosing it's wifi connection, I tried another wifi module (borrowed from another machine) but the same fault, tried with a LAN cable, same fault. After the fault occurs you can go to the device manager and it shows the device drivers for the wifi and lan are ok and device is working fine. Not getting any error warnings from microsoft like you would normally with a software error/crash. When the fault occurs the machine won't shut down either, i have to force it to shut down. If I bring up task manager it shows a whole list of stopped services. Screen dump attached.
Seems to be worse when the machine gets hot. Me thinks it's a hardware error by any advice appreciated.

Machine is an old ACER i5 running win7 64bit.

[slewinson]

Sounds similar to symptoms I had with a couple of HP laptops. The CPU heatsing was clogged with fluff and started to overheat the CPU and other chips in the same area of the motherboard. Suggest giving it a good blow of compressed air in the reverse direction and see what comes out.

Next I would stuff in a spare hard disk and build a virgin Win7 or similar to test if it is a driver problem.

Simon

[festy]

Yeah my first guess would be a cooked CPU.
Try reducing the CPU speed to ~50% and see if that stops the problems.

[immortality]

I recently replaced the power socket and gave the whole machine a good blowout.


problem is getting worse, even when it's not that hot now. How do you reduce cpu speed?

[Chuff]

After many years my main laptop starting playing up to the point were it was unusable, so I reverted back to my old laptop. Sadly a dodgy power socket ended that exercise, so a few weeks ago I decided to strip down my main laptop for a look-see. This is what I found:

Needless to say the fan was having no luck cooling things down & subsequently the whole system would very quickly overheat and become unstable. I had to remove the motherboard in order to get to it, so it required a complete strip down, but once it was reassembled it was as good as the day I bought it. You could try blowing it out as slewinson suggested, but if it's anything like what I found then I'm not sure how much success you would have.

Good luck.

Chuff

[vlad01]

could be the heat sink isn't interfacing the CPU properly thus failing to transfer the heat to the heat sink, seen that issue before in laptops. Also seen the BGA joints crack from overheating and thermal cycles but usually that results in no starting at all.

get a program called core temp. it will allow you to see the CPU temps, also worth running prime95 and see if it hangs or gets errors in the results, that would indicate hardware issues.

[festy]

In "Power options" control panel, change the plan settings, go into advanced, find the CPU options and set the max % for plugged in and on battery.
If the CPU has overheated it's likely to be permanently damaged, but reducing the speed (and heat) might reduce the symptoms to a usable state.

I recently had to retire a laptop of mine because the fan failed and cooked the CPU. I replaced the fan but it was never the same, randomly crashing whenever it got hot and generally doing weird things.

[immortality]

Ok, installed core temp. cores sitting high 80's to low 90's @ 100% load. All working ok for now? not sure what the normal temps are but this does seem high for an intel chip.

Also installed prime95 and running it. No faults shown so far.

[festy]

I start getting worried at 70*. Get the marshmallows ready

[vlad01]

Wow that pretty hot, coretemp should give you the Tj Max value. Over that it throttles itself to try prevent damage.