Notebook locks up then get the dreaded bluescreen

[altair401]

Hey guys---

Well I'm scared that either my HD or FAN or combination of the two is bad. This is what I have:

Sony Vaio Notebook PCG-GR370
Pentium 3M
1.13 GHz
256 MB RAM

Basically I started noticing this 2 days ago. My notebook started locking up for no apparent reason. I was concerned that maybe the system was running to hot so I downloaded "Speedfan" which gives a realtime reading of how hot the system is. According to that, my system was running between 106F-112f. That seems really hot to me. Anyways, just before my system would lock up I would hear 3 or 4 clicking noises coming from the hard drive.

That's when my system would lock up. Sometimes I will recieve a bluescreen telling me that the system had been shutdown to stop possible damage from occuring to the system.

Here's the wierd part. I would then restart and then nothing, I would get a notice telling me that the OS was missing. The BIOS is updated so I know that's not the problem. After waiting a few minutes I would try and restart again, and no problems...my system starts normally.

The whole hard drive is backed up on a seperate pc hard drive so I then reinstalled my notebook system. That went smoothly. I went ahead and started DL the windows updates starting with SP1. At this point I let it do its thing and went and had some lunch. I periodically checked things and SP1 seemed to install fine. I left again and came back about 20min later and the bluescreen was back.

Arghhh! This sux cuz a new HD isn't cheap on a notebook. I want to make sure thats the problem before I go out and buy a new one. I'd hate to spend $200 on one and then experience the same thing over again. The fan seems to run but it only runs when the system reaches a certain temp. Is it possible to have it run constantly? I tried to find these settings in the Phoenix BIOS through CMOS but when I arttempt to modify the power settings, itjust displays a notice that the power settings can not be adjusted in ACPI mode and that I should contact the system supervisor? It would be nice if I could access these settings. Anyway...sorry for the long post...any help would greatly be appreciated. Thanks.

 

[satrow]

You could test your drive on a PC via a notebook to IDE adapter. Open the notebook to clean out the 'dustbunnies', esp. near and in the fan housings.
I8kfanGUI

http://www.diefer.de/i8kfan/index.html

is a fan speed controller for Dell notebooks of a similar age, it (or a similar prog), may work on your Sony.

Andy.

 

[altair401]

Nope it can't access the fan. But it does register my HD temp at 122F..I cant find any other fan controllers either...

 

[rclarke250]

you could just download a hard drive test like drive fitness tools from ibm,make the boot disk and test the drive.

 

[altair401]

Ok Well I'm 100% sure this is an overheating problem. To temporarily combat this, I have placed my notebook on cooler icepacks to keep the damn thing from overheating. When the ice packs thaw out at the end of the day, that's when the problem reappears. I downloaded a tool to monitor how hot the HD is getting and I'm shutting it down whenever im not using it (not very convenient if you like to file-share)

But anyway, I'll pop it open this weekend in order to monitor the fan to see if its spinning or not. I hate to disassemble it but I gotta do what I gotta do...I'm half way through getting my A+ certification anyway so I'm relatively confortable with doing this.

Anyone here ever have to replace a fan for a laptop before? It seems like it should be a relatively easy thing to do. From what Ive seen online on where it's located inside and how to get to it, I won't have to disasemble the laptop too much. Obviously I'll try to clear out any dust-bunnies before I go ahead and replace anything first. Oh well, I had to replace the keyboard anyways (OJ spill from 2 years ago)...Wish me luck!