Gateway 400sd4 laptop freezes randomly 2

[duhaggie]

Gateway 400SD4 notebook. 2.4 mghz P4, 512 Ram, 40g HD, XP Home SP2. The unit is out of Warranty.

I have installed Microsoft Office, Adobe Pro with additional web tools, Norton Utilities, System Mechanic 4, Gateway utilities and tools. I have also added a Cingular wireless data card.

I have installed all of Gateways updates including the BIOS update. I have used all of the utilities offered by Norton and System Mechanic, also, the XP utilities to troubleshoot the system and registry. I have changed the memory with no help. There are not any driver conflicts, however, I have uninstalled and reinstalled any driver that I have added. I have not reinstalled XP yet, but I do not really believe this will help and it is a lot of work to reinstall my additional software. I have cleaned out the intake ports and made sure all of the (3) cooling fans are working freely.

The laptop crashes randomly and I really do not see a relationship as to how much of a load I am putting on the system (just checking email, watching a DVD, all the way to running multiple applications and pages at the same time). Most of the time it freezes (the screen, keyboard, mouse stop working, occasionally it blue screens with a memory dump). Mostly it will not immediately boot back up (It will not make it to the F2, F10 options or to BIOS). I have noticed that if I pull the battery for a few seconds and reinstall the battery it will generally boot up normally, however, it will often crash again shortly thereafter.

I think the problem may be heat related or possibly the BIOS. Is it possible the problem is the motherboard or processor?

Any help would be appreciated!

 

[micker377]

If possible, go into BIOS and reset to "safe" or "basic", or whatever it calls booting at slowest speed.

 

[Budley]

Sounds like a heat problem to me as well. If blowing all your ports out with canned air does not help, you may need to do some disassembly and physically wiped down all your heat sink surfaces. Let us know how it works out.

 

[duhaggie]

Thanks Micker,
I either do not know how to reset to "safe" or "basic" in the BIOS or such an option is not available on this laptop.
Duh

 

[duhaggie]

Hello Budley,
Actually, I removed the heat sink and CPU last night. The heat sink vents were clean. I cleaned the top of the CPU and reassembled with new silver thermal paste. I believe it helped, however, during my first attempt to respond to you from this laptop several hours ago, it shut itself down. Since then, I cleaned out the registry and ran all of my diagonistic tools (which I did not do after performing the work mentioned above). It has been running for 3 hours now (so far, so good).
Thanks,
Duh