Overheated??

[Toonah]

My second machine is a PII 300 with W98SE. Four years old now. All of a sudden it locks up after 15 minutes of running anything. My expert suggested cpu overheating. I removed the case cover and it was a dusty nightmare. I ran a house fan right onto the mobo/cpu and the thing worked fine. Then I added a rear fan, second front fan and blew out all the dust and gank. All cards are seated fine etc.
Put cover back on and same thing. The chip felt very hot to the touch before I used the big fan w/o case cover. Does this sound like a tired cpu fan/themal paste problem? Should I replace fan/paste first and recheck? thanks

 

[lgebhart]

I hope you didn't touch any of the components with your house fan because the static electricity will surely have adverse affects on your components. Your system should be cool enough with all you have done to it. I never used thermal paste on a CPU at that speed but if you have paste on it, it won't hurt to check it and see if cleaning it off and reapplying more helps.

Did this problem just start recently? Do you have an anti-virus running and the definitions updated?

Here are some other things you can check:

Have you checked to see how much hard drive space you have left? How much RAM do you have? Computers will freeze if they don't have enough storage or RaM on them. What do you have loading in the bottom right hand corner of the desktop? The more you have loading on startup the less memory you have to run programs. Unfortunately many programs installed will put themselves in that system tray and they don't need to be there. How many temporary files do you have? Do you delete your temporary internet files? Have you ran scandisk and defrag?

If you need instructions on any of these let us know. ggebhart@clover.net
I hope I never get too old or arrogant to learn something new!

 

[Toonah]

Yes I did scan/frag a week before. RAM is I think 224 or so. HD is 1/3 full. This lock up started all of a sudden. I kept the big fan 2 feet from opened case. The machine locks up and won't restart with CAD. The reboot button on the front can take two or three punches to make it reboot. Does not matter what is running program wise. Usually about 15 mintues with the "regular" fan array. Thanks for any thoughts...

 

[libertytech]

This sounds like a definite heat issue to me.

Firstly, the problem arose again when you replaced the outer cover on your case. Have you thought of a new case where your components are not so close together? Also if you installed a case fan you'll want it as close to the processor as you can get it.

One more thing, and sorry if this is a silly question: Do you have a heatsink on this chip or just a fan? Perhaps a larger heatsink, and/or a larger fan will help to dissipate the heat from your CPU.

Let us know what works for you, or if any information is incorrect.

 

[MA5]

If you put a house fan near the mobo and the system works ok.
Then your problem is a over heating or a shot component one.
Assuming you have changed the CPU’s fan and still getting the problem then you might have one of the folowing problems:
1- your BIOS has flipped and has over clocked your CPU. Over clocked CPU's run hotter and are unstable. Check your BIOS and set the correct speed and if the system clock speeds up or slows down then hange the BIOS backup battery.
2- the power supply regulator circuitry (on mobo) feeding the CPU is shot and over feeding it. therefore over heating the CPU.
3- even one of the cards, hard disk, PSU etc could be giving up ghost.

Recommendation: Back up your H/D data first before doing anything else.

Good luck
Mas

 

[Toonah]

So today I got a new fan/heatsink for the chip....the old fan/heatsink had no paste and had a area that looked a bit
"scorched"....ouch. I put the new fan/sink on with thermal paste and the new case fans and put it back together and turned it on and had to leave. I will know later if it kept going or froze again. My chop shop has a used PII chip they can slap in for @ $50. I will have to wait on checking the above mentioned items. Thanks