Overheating HGL-30?

My HGL-30 has of lately decided to shut itself down every hour or so. Whenever this happens, I can't immediately turn it back on, and the battery doesn't seem to charge (while it's plugged in to the power supply, obviously), mainly by the small "charging" light turning off, despite the cable being connected.

I had no idea what could be causing it, but I think the culprit is overheating. The left side becomes EXTREMELY hot to the touch, and from what nTune is telling me, the 7600 is running at 56 C (133 F) while doing non-intensive tasks (ie. web browsing, etc.). I'm not sure what BIOS I'm running, whatever came from the factory (laptop about a year old), and I will upgrade as soon as I can get a USB stick (can't I just use a CD? If so, please tell me how), but do you have any idea what could be causing this overheating?

Also, by the way, I had Artic Silver put on the processor (thank you, powernotebooks), so it should theoretically be a lot cooler than it is. Thanks in advance. Needless to say, I haven't OC'ed anything.

 

It might be the charging or ac adapter circuit. On a few older notebooks i had a similar problem where the ac jack on the notebook would get hot and disconnect allowing the notebook os to shut down and not work again for a while. Look into that.

It might very well be that it indeed is getting hot, is the fan running ?

pete

 

how long have you had it? if youve had it for over a year, crack it open and check the fan on the left side for dust, as if you've never cleaned it of dust, it is probably clogged. Lots of people have had this issue, and go out and buy a notebook cooler when all they needed to do was wield a screw driver for 15 minutes.

Also, if you have those plastic covers inside your pc card and express card slots, take them out and your left palm rest won't get so warm, and your hard drive temp will drop a few degrees.

 

My HGL30's video card reads in at about 56-58 C on average when I'm just web browsing as well, and I don't really remember when it wasn't about in this range. I've never had any problems with it shutting down from overheating, so I've always considered this to be pretty normal. I've also had the laptop for about a year now, and have opened up the bottom to blow some dust out as well, but there were no big changes in temperatures; so I am a little surprised you're having those kinds of problems because we seem to be in a similar situation otherwise (though, I'm running bios version 111A). Hopefully you find out what's going on with your system though, I'll be interested to see what's at the root of the problem.

 

Since its a year old, i also suggest that you clean out the vents and fans as Glare mentioned.

Also i suggest that you monitor your CPU and HDD temps
(it talks about monitoring CPU/HDD temps at the bottom of Gophns post)

 

Alright, thanks. Removing the plastic things has helped so far, I haven't had it crash (though I haven't played for long periods of time recently).

Now I'm getting errors on my hard drive

Seems the problems never stop. At startup it gives me an error message saying that it the hard drive is likely to fail. I'm backing important stuff up, but is there any chance this is an error on part of the computer? I'll give error message specifics as soon as I get it again.

 

Hard drives have a safety measure called S.M.A.R.T. and what it does is try to give you a early warning that hard drive failure is imminent. most of the time it works well, I'd say 75% of the time. The S.M.A.R.T. is probably monitored by the BIOS during boot, so you get the warning message.

Keep backing up your stuff, and to make sure it is the S.M.A.R.T. system that is causing the error message, get Notebook Hardware Control, as it will tell you if that is what the problem is.

Are you still under warranty? You could RMA it.. It is likely the overheating of your laptop for an extended period of time has screwed your hard drive. Hard drives can usually stand up to 60C with no problems, and after that, it's anyone's guess as to when it'll fail.

You could also try updating your BIOS to a newer version, maybe this is a problem that was patched in a previous BIOS fix. Though admittedly, I doubt that is the problem.

 

I'm pretty sure my warranty has expired. Yes, it said something relating to S.M.A.R.T. or something similar. I'm not that fussed about losing the actual hard drive as I was going to update it soon anyways.

I'll update the BIOS ASAP, but even if it doesn't help, I'm not that worried about the stuff on the hard drive, as I reformatted very recently, so there's not a lot of data on there that isn't backed up. Thanks for all your help