Laptop going to shit

My laptop has been falling apart for a little while now. I thought it was just dusty, but I took it apart yesterday and aside from a slight amount of dust and a tiny dead spider, it was clean. It's a mid-range ASUS laptop with a i5, 8gig ram, and 500gb 7200 drive. I don't think the fans are working anymore, the laptop peaks out at almost 95 degrees Celsius plugged in a running. I've got a nice 2 fan belkin laptop cooler and even that doesn't do shit when it gets that hot besides keep it below 90 Celsius... I think it could be my battery failing as the laptop only holds charge for like 2 hours...

 

Does anyone know of any solutions to this, I know I need a new computer and to stop using this one all the time, but times are rough and I'm saving to move. I've backed up all my music/vsts/daws to an external expecting the worst, but I'd be pretty sad without this laptop..

 

 

plz help obiwatmm kanobie, you're my only hope.

 

you should start looking for modestly priced receptacles.

Spyware? Hard drive?

CPU might be cooking bro i got no idea - that sucks though man sorry to read

 

 

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Hmmmm, it's a tricky one. Sounds like a motherboard problem if theres no signal going to the fan in which case the motherboard will overheat. Sounds like a fried motherboard. It's a decent spec comp, i would take it to a computer shop to check it out. Brace yourself for the possibility of weighing up the options of having to buy a new comp or a costly repair.

Replace the fan and replace your cooling paste. Also get the dust out. I have no idea how much this will cost, but these are all sensible solutions.

Set it on fire and pray to the Wiccan gods.

  On 2/12/2014 at 9:33 PM, Phoenix said:

Replace the fan and replace your cooling paste. Also get the dust out. I have no idea how much this will cost, but these are all sensible solutions.

Absolutely - 95c is really bloody hot, you should be looking at around 40-70 for general use. I'd get the fans sorted or you're definitely asking for trouble !

  On 2/12/2014 at 9:33 PM, Phoenix said:

Replace the fan and replace your cooling paste. Also get the dust out. I have no idea how much this will cost, but these are all sensible solutions.

 

This except I personally wouldn't touch the cooling paste until it's a last resort though. (usually it's a pain to get to cpu's on laptops)

 

Look for new fans to install possibly. You can get almost any part to any computer on ebay. If you can't find the exact part find something that will work from PC parts store.

 

Buy a new battery. You need one anyway if the charge doesn't hold like it should. If it's plugged in and you still have the same problems it isn't the battery obviously.

 

Check your bios to make sure about the fans. You should get some system information there. You might try resetting the bios as well. Maybe download a system performance monitor to check for anything out of the ordinary.

 

If you take the casing off so there is open air flow and turn on the pc and it still has problems it is probably something other than straight up heat problems unless it is directly related to cooling paste.

 

Reformatting is never a bad idea. Sometimes shit gets wacky.

 

A small amount of dust will cause problems with laptops.

Edited February 12, 2014 by AdieuErsatzEnnui

  On 2/12/2014 at 10:31 PM, AdieuErsatzEnnui said:

 

  On 2/12/2014 at 9:33 PM, Phoenix said:

Replace the fan and replace your cooling paste. Also get the dust out. I have no idea how much this will cost, but these are all sensible solutions.

 

This except I personally wouldn't touch the cooling paste until it's a last resort though. (usually it's a pain to get to cpu's on laptops)

 

Look for new fans to install possibly. You can get almost any part to any computer on ebay. If you can't find the exact part find something that will work from PC parts store.

 

Buy a new battery. You need one anyway if the charge doesn't hold like it should. If it's plugged in and you still have the same problems it isn't the battery obviously.

 

Check your bios to make sure about the fans. You should get some system information there. You might try resetting the bios as well. Maybe download a system performance monitor to check for anything out of the ordinary.

 

If you take the casing off so there is open air flow and turn on the pc and it still has problems it is probably something other than straight up heat problems unless it is directly related to cooling paste.

 

Reformatting is never a bad idea. Sometimes shit gets wacky.

 

A small amount of dust will cause problems with laptops.

 

Yeh, I'm no laptop expert (still have a desktop, although it rests on the floor.. does that make it a floortop?)but when my computer crashed because of overheating, replacing the cooling paste did the trick.

does it do that when you boot your OS? You should be able to check Fan speed, temperature etc in the BIOS as well. This way you could determine if it's simply a software error. Did you google the error for your model?

Computer is clean of spyware and malware, just cleaned. Did a bios check and my fans are shot and not responding. It's a hardware issue. It's odd, there isn't much dust if any in there. This thing is built like a tank, it took me a good 30+ tiny ass screws just to disassemble the thing and check the motherboard in full.

 

Ordered a new battery and will look into swapping the fan, but will most likely just end up upgrading my desktop and stop using this thing so much until I can fix it/afford another. Live is not a friendly piece of software for a laptop IMO, I've been using this thing as my main studio/work/home computer for so long I probably just fried it.

 

 

Thanks for the replies gents, nobody around me is very tech-savvy so I came where I knew people would know more about computers than myself

 

Live long and proper!

i had this exact problem (apart from the dead baby spider) and i just got a new battery, new fan and installed ubuntu.

 

still not quite getting on with ubuntu but i'm not having any issues with my laptop now.

  On 2/13/2014 at 8:33 AM, Audioblysk said:

Computer is clean of spyware and malware, just cleaned. Did a bios check and my fans are shot and not responding. It's a hardware issue. It's odd, there isn't much dust if any in there. This thing is built like a tank, it took me a good 30+ tiny ass screws just to disassemble the thing and check the motherboard in full.

 

Ordered a new battery and will look into swapping the fan, but will most likely just end up upgrading my desktop and stop using this thing so much until I can fix it/afford another. Live is not a friendly piece of software for a laptop IMO, I've been using this thing as my main studio/work/home computer for so long I probably just fried it.

 

 

Thanks for the replies gents, nobody around me is very tech-savvy so I came where I knew people would know more about computers than myself

 

You should try resetting the Bios. I think you can do this from with the Bios menu. You might have to pull the cmos battery to do a full reset. Might even have a bios update available if you want to check for that first.

 

It's very odd that both your fans just stopped working, and nothing else is having issues. On most motherboards the plugs for the fans are relatively far away from each other. Meaning that two random areas of your motherboard are fried with no damage to any other area, or the fans are running from a single source of some kind. I'm not really sure specifically how that works, but it's weird. Seems like a fluky problem to be having.

 

You should also try running your pc with it taken apart and check the CPU heat. I think it shows in Bios as well. That will indicate if the primary problem is the fan malfunction.

 

I've literally never had a motherboard go bad before, and the one I thought was bad turned out to work just fine. It's over 10 years old now. I would imagine that things like hard drives, cpus, gpus, and ram are much more common for malfunction. Only motherboard I've broken I bent the cpu socket pins on.

 

Also, old fans sometimes get dust wrapped up around the bearings and things which causes them to run at lower rpms. It could possibly stop them entirely.

 

You could also try lubing them. It's possible if they are old enough that the lubrication has solidified causing them not to spin. This would jive with the concept that they both stopped working at the same time. I've used WD40 before, but it's technically not a lubricant, and I have no idea how safe it is. I think sewing machine lubrication, or a clean type of teflon bike chain lube would work very safely.

 

If you want to push the laptop longer I would recommend checking you have the max capacity of ram installed. IF you don't you can purchase it and install it. Plus adding an SSD as a primary drive, and keeping the disk drive as secondary will bring your performance extremely relevant. You can also just instal SSD, and use an external drive for data storage. The cpu could also be upgraded possibly as well. If it's an older model it might be cost effective to upgrade the CPU. GPU is sometimes available to upgrade if you can find the part on Ebay, and your's isn't an onboard. Many laptops are though.

 

(looking at your spec you don't need to upgrade the RAM. CPU might be worth it since you already have it apart. SSD will definitely be worth it.)

 

I have an Asus G50v that is like 5 years old. I slapped an SSD into it and it's relevant. I use it for work. It runs Photoshop, Acrobat, and a full workload no problem. It's a champ. Looking now i can actually slap 4 gb more of ram in the bitch. I might. These things run anywhere from 300-700 bucks on eBay still. Don't give up hope yours yet man. Laptop parts are easy because everyone parts them out on eBay.

 

 

Also, check if there is a CPU fan and that it is clean and running properly. I'm not sure what model you are running, and you haven't given too many details so I just covered everything I can think of.

Edited February 17, 2014 by AdieuErsatzEnnui