You might also reapply thermal paste for cpu and heatsink.
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Laptop overheating and temperature monitoring
I have had several occurances of my laptop shutting down during startup but eventually staying on afte several attempts. I suspect that this is due to CPU overheating. Could this be the case or are there other possibilities?
Can I monitor the CPU temperature on my Compaq nw8240 laptop running under Windows XP prof SP2? and if so, then how?
The airvents are kept clean and clear. I even cleaned the air rotor using pressurized air externally.
The HP site is not easily helpful.
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Answers
http://www.chillblast.com/
Only needed if the CPU and heatsink have become separated though.
Overheating problems usually show up after the laptop has been on for some period of time rather than immediately on startup. The typical symptoms are lockup or spontaneous shutdown after the laptop has been on for a period of time that decreases with increasing ambient temperature, and failure of the laptop to restart untill it has had a chance to cool down. Occasionally a heatsink will come loose and the cpu will overheat immediately, but in this case it will usually not improve with several restarts. I'm not sure what to make of the 5 temperature readings you're getting from MobileMeter. I just installed it on a thinkpad g40 and get only one temperature plus hdd temp. It's possible that MobileMeter is picking up cpu, gpu, northbridge, southbridge, and ambient temperatures. Several of the temperatures you report would concern me if they were cpu temps.
It would help to have a bit more information on your symptoms: do you get a Windows bluescreen error before it shuts down, does it shut down in the middle of running Windows or just on startup, is there anything in the system log to indicate a hardware problem, does the problem occur more often after you've been running the laptop for a while or after its been off for a while, does it ever happen when you're booting from a fully charged battery or only when you have it plugged in?
Let us know more about the symptoms you're having, and perhaps we can narrow down the possibilities a bit more.
The temperature results are from the built in thermal sensors on the board. The problem is it is often difficult to tell which is which as there is no agreed order in how they are connected, it varies with the board system manufacturer and sometime changes between the same manufacturer's boards.
As you have a number of readings there is a good chance that the BIOS on your laptop has built-in hardware recognition of each for these and it is possible if you go into setup there will be a hardware diagnostics page giving you both the temperatures and what each reading is referring to.
In the meantime I remembered another utility that works the same way as MobileMeter but allows you to directly access the boards fan controllers
http://www.almico.com/sfdo
On a separate track which version of the BIOS are you working with? There was a major fix for thermal issues for your model issued as Version F.0F
I agree with ti-tech though what you are describing is not typical of a thermal cut out on a processor (even an M770) and if it is actually heat related could be more due to heat causing an electrical contact somewhere on the board to expand and break. If this is heat related you wouldn't expect the machine to recover without sufficient time for the affected component to cool below a critical temperature.
The syptoms are: after lengthy use the laptop becomes hot and will shut down at the beginning of a reboot unless allowed to cool for a while first.
Other symptoms which might be related; streaming of sound files (mostly WAV or MP3 academic lectures) ocassionally seems to skip forward so it is like a telephone conversation with a bad line hearing only intermittent disconnected parts of the transmission.
I'm pretty sure that the problem is overheating and this is despite the use of a port replicator which raises the laptop from the desk and allows a free airflow from beneath. I have not attempted overclocking but would it be worthwhile trying to underclock a little? Perhaps a small desk fan would help.
I really appreciate the explanations and help which has been posted here and I hope that you will continue to help me resolve this issue. I guess the next step is to send the laptop back to HP?
What causes the reboot? Does it stall or do you reboot the unit for some reason? If this unit indeed does overheat, it must be defective and should be sent back for a replacement. It could, however, be someting with the O/S or rather, the hard drive, but that may be difficult to pinpoint. At what stage of the reboot does it stall?
/RID
Thank you all for your relevant and helpful comments.
Epilogue:
1. I need to upgrade the BIOS. It is 2 versions behind. Thanks for the reminder.
2. I have been trying to clean the fan underneath the unit by using compressed air but this was only partially successful. I then applied a rather powerful vacuum cleaner to the fan and drew out a lump of dirt and dust which seems to have done the trick. The fan is now working well and the temperatureS are reasonable.
3. I suspect that there is a secondary fan which should activate if the temperature climbs but I may be confused with my previous or office laptop. How can I check this?
Glad to hear that you have the problem solved. It is remarkable sometimes how much dust gets sucked in by laptop fans, and the heat exchangers make excellent dust filters. According to the service manual, your laptop should have only one fan. It will cycle on & off and may also speed up and slow down depending on cpu temperature.
What is your opinion of undervolting as described below? What is undervolting? How is it done?
__________________
Undervolting nw8240
I just undervolted Pentium M in my nw8240 . It decreases heat emission with no loss in performance. See this tutorial for it: http://www.notebookforums.
I used Centrino Hardware Control rather than RMClock, since I found it to be a little nicer program.
The default voltage at 15x multiplier (2.0 GHz) was set to 1.356 V and at 6X (800 MHz) to 0.988 V. The heat level normally was 85 degrees at 15x and 100% CPU load and 50 degrees at 6x idle.
I was able to undervolt 15x to 1.100 V being stable but I chose to run at 1.116 V just to be safe. The heat level decreased to 70 degrees! So the drop was 15 degrees. The casing (thermal zone 2) is a bit cool er now too - dropped from 85 to 75 or so. It still heats and is of course noticeable, but all this for free is a good deal.
I undervolted 6X to 0.700 V and it worked well, but I didn't notice any difference in idle temperature. Well, maybe 1 or 2 degrees.
Well, is undervolting worth the trouble? Maybe. The computer heats a bit less, but actually it doesn't heat so much normally either - at least mine doesn't. But since undervolting is a free upgrade, you can just do it if you have time. Of course, if you don't mind testing stability, you may just pick some numbers (like mine) and let it go and hope that it's stable for your CPU as well. But note that my stable voltage was a few steps higher than that of the original undervolting thread starter, even though we have the same CPUs, so the stability of an individual CPU cannot be guaranteed without testing.
EDIT: 1.116 V wasn't working perfectly, so I'm running at 1.132 V. So far so good.
EDIT 2: Undervolting increases battery life, I could run the DVD test again at some point and see how the laptops performs now.
My appologies for taking so long to reply. As far as I can tell, you have no direct control over fan speed or cut-off temperature without third-party software. Speedfan (http://www.almico.com/sfd
Good luck, and keep us posted on how undervolting works out if you try it.
I have decided to use a laptop cooling unit rather than risky undervolting. This unit has a USB connection to the laptop and comprises a plate, about 2 cm thick, with 3 built in fans. Up untl now I have been working directly under the air conditioner vent at home (which brings the working termperature down by about 4 degs).....which is a pretty cool idea :) although requires warm clothing.
thanks for all the help.
Latest update.
Local HP support sent a technician to my office where he replaced the main board. 3 HP engineers were of the opinion that the most likely problem was the main board. It took about 45 minutes.
This was excellant service provided by HP within the 3 year guarantee period.
The laptop is now running a bit cooler than before although I am still unsure what "normal" might be and have no good way to measure the running temperature. I still rely on the Mobmeter.exe tool which displays 4 different temperatures.
Perhaps we should all take a thermometer measurement of our laptops by the air vent when they are new so that we will be able to measure any suspected overheating at a later date!
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by: MASQUERAIDPosted on 2007-07-14 at 08:24:41ID: 19487186
Try downloading MobileMeter to get your CPU temperature
http://tamaru.homeip.net/~
If the fans are running and the casing does not get hot the only reason to suspect CPU overheating at start-up is if you've recently tried overclocking or the heatsink has separated. The major reason for overheating (dust) seems to have already been dealt with.