Fix laptop in city centre.

Flojo

Hey all, my lappy is a bit fried and I don't fancy having to get it fixed by Dell and fork out 200quid then being left without it for two weeks .. so I was wondering if anyone knew of a person or a place I could bring it into so they could check it out (at a decent price)
Cheers in advance

Mrs OBumble

In other threads there, Laptek on Eyre St have had good reviews.

Havn't used 'em myself, no connection to the business.

Flojo

Whoops my bad.. didn't spot that massive thread lol!
Awesome cheers for that shall check them out.

biko

When you say fried, do you mean there seem to be a physical problem (damage) or just that "it's slow"?

The guys in Laptops can definitely help.

Flojo

Physical damage.. I already used C-cleaner on it and reformatted it myself, not much joy. I think it's either the fan is busted or the motherboard is on the way out.

ScumLord

How old is it?

Programs like HDtune and CystalDiskInfo can tell you if there's a hard drive problem which can cause your PC to run slow.

Also you could be suffering from this problem.

Flojo

It's two years old in sept.. starting giving me hassle when it was only a year old. It's over heating and switching off whenever I try game on it. I downloaded a program to see what the temp was and it was hitting the 90s

Thanks for suggestions though!

Flojo

Oh god Scumlord.. just spotted your link... feel like crying lol! My poor baby

Megatron_X

I've had a good few problems with my Dell that I couldn't fix myself (and I'm quite technology oriented) and I really recommend Lapteck.

Flojo

I've tried everything now at this stage.. got a good offer through PM so will see how that works out! Thank god for Boards.ie eh

Thanks for your help everyone!

ScumLord

Flojo wrote: »

Oh god Scumlord.. just spotted your link... feel like crying lol! My poor baby

If it does turn out to be one of the faulty motherboards you may be able to get Dell to fix it even out of warranty as it left the factory with a fault.

Flojo

Ah just spotted the years.. I bought mine in 2008! So it wouldn't be one of them. Shame getting it sorted for free would have been nice, still the matter of the two week wait though!

ScumLord

It does sound like an overheating issue anyway it may not be fixable if there's nothing wrong with the fan, laptops aren't really designed for games as they can't provide adequate room for cooling. You can get mats to put under them that keeps them cooler but over all there's just not enough room to move the air through the system, you've got two very hot chips right next to each other in an enclosed space it's always going to cause problems.

BostonB

Laptops suck in dust which can make them overheat.

Flojo

Checked it for dust already and it's actually not bad like. Didn't have a can of condensed air at the time though. The Panel facing the fan is discoloured from heat I'm guessing. So I guess Scumlord you're right, I must have been putting it under too much pressure and ageing it faster.
Raging now cause I really want to get back to gaming and can't afford a decent pc set up

Thanks for your help everyone!

BostonB

Which laptop is it. I have a Dell 9400 laptop I've use for gaming for years and never had a problem with it. Perhaps the gfx card is a little cooked, as you only have the problem while gaming.

Flojo

It started with gaming.. but now if it has been on for a while and I have firefox running with a few tabs open and try play even a few facebook games it can freak out on me and shut off. It's the Dell studio 1735. Temperatures running into 90s isn't normal!

Also my touch pad freaks out on me and bugs the system.. only way to get out of it is to take out the battery and it only turns on by the Dell media direct button haha!

BostonB

Theres a few posts on the web with similar problems.

http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/laptop/f/3518/p/19325006/19678743.aspx#19678743

Flojo

Yeap I heard it's quite common aswell for them to over heat, only thing was I wasn't exactly sure why mine was doing it.
Just hoping I can get it fixed without having to go to Dell and spend a fortune!

This guy is a legend! Thanks so much for finding that link.. I spent months trawling through that forum and sh!tty other pc sites trying to find solution.

After 3 days of troubleshooting I now consider myself an expert in this matter. Below is a veritable thesis on everything you could ever need (or want ) to know about this problem. I know it is long, but it is worth reading through to completely understand what this problem is due to and how to fix it.
A intermittent/random/unexpected immediate/instantaneous shut down (without the normal shut down/power down sequence) is a safety feature (I am guessing as a component of the bios, but who knows) that functions to prevent heat damage to the CPU or GPU. When these chips reach a certain critical threshold temperature a heat sensor is tripped to protect the hardware.
Three separate problems can activate this feature:
1. an error in the bios.
Solution: update the bios
2. a dysfunctional heat sensor
Solution: run Dell Diagnostics to confirm (see below).
3. its actually too hot
Solution: depends
As diagnosing (2.) is involved with (3.) I will just go through (3.).
There are 5 hardware components to defray heat from the C/GPU. In order of heat transfer:
A. thermal adhesive/pad/glue/compound
B. heat sink tubing
C. fan
D. heat sink
E. vents built into the base of the laptop
The thermal material conducts heat from the C/GPU to the copper tubing which is routed towards the fan and the heat sink. Heat thus travels from the C/GPU to the external environment with the fan blowing hot air out through the heat sink and ultimately through the vents visible on the base of your laptop. Any one of these components can malfunction:
A. thermal material can dry and/or crack disturbing its perfect interface that uniformly transforms heat from the C/GPU to the copper tubing thus creating localized hot spots on the C/GPU. This can in turn fry a portion of your processor.
Solution: you'll need a new processor
B. heat sink tubing can break or dislodge.
Solution: I don't know enough about this type of damage to usefully discuss it but if the tubing is damaged replacing the whole heat sink assembly will only cost about $50 if you search around online. Incidentally the model for Studio 1735 is NU380.
C. the fan either works or it doesn't - if you hear the fan its working, if you never hear it, it likely is not working.
Solution: follow the steps in the system manual for your particular dell laptop to replace the fan. I just worked on this on my own machine and its obnoxiously designed. You literally have to disassemble the entire Studio 1735 to access the fan. I don't know what the engineers were thinking.
D. The likelihood of the heat sink itself being damaged is slim to none unless you have physically damaged your laptop and if damage has been significant enough to damage the grate you ought to be thinking about more than just the heat sink grid as the force involved in that kind of trauma has probably disturbed the system board and the variety of chips attached to it.
Solution: There are actually 2 grids - one is integrated into the heat sink assembly, the other is integrated into the fan assembly. If you have to replace either component, the grid will come along with it.
IMPORTANT: THE MOST LIKELY CAUSE OF YOUR COMPUTER OVERHEATING IS NOT ACTUAL DAMAGE TO ANY OF THE ABOVE COMPONENTS BUT DISRUPTION TO THE HEAT TRANSFER. THE THERMAL ADHESIVE DELL USES IS CHEAP AND SHOULD BE REPLACED ANNUALLY. HOWEVER, WHAT TAKES THE CAKE IS DUST. ONE THINKS (AND I INCLUDE MYSELF HERE) THAT BY USING AN AIR CAN THAT YOU ARE KEEPING YOUR LAPTOP CLEAN. THIS IS ABSOLUTELY NOT TRUE!!! USING A CAN OF AIR TO BLOW OUT DUST ACCESSIBLE VIA VENTS ONLY WORKS FOR AIR FLOW ACCESSIBLE VIA THOSE VENTS. THAT INNER HEAT SINK GRID I SPOKE OF ABOVE (THAT IS ATTACHED TO THE FAN) WILL NOT BE CLEANED BY FORCEFUL AIR FLOW. IN ORDER TO CLEAN THIS HEAT SINK YOU WILL HAVE TO DISASSEMBLE THE ENTIRE LAPTOP (AS I DESCRIBED ABOVE FOR FAN REPLACEMENT) AND WHEN YOU TAKE OUT THE FAN YOU WILL THEN SEE THE DUST THAT HAS COLLECTED THERE.
Ok, so you now know how the system works, what can go wrong, and how to fix what can go wrong. Here is how you can diagnose what the actual problem is. If I am not mistaken, all dell (at least) laptops come with their hard drive partitioned. On the partition is a diagnostic utility accessible during the boot sequence with F12. The absolute most sure fire way to assess what damage your system has (if any) is to run the extended diagnostics. This may occur after a pre-system diagnostic test or may be directly accessible. In this diagnostic utility you will be able to assess the integrity of your heat sensors, your processors, your memory, your harddrive and a variety of other components that can be damaged by overheating. The utility is fairly self explanatory to operate and guides you through its use. If you are a more comfortable user, you can use other features of the diagnostic utility that more directly assess particular system features. Thus, this diagnostic will solve problems with both (2.) and (3.).
My suggestion is to run through the diagnostics before you start attempting to replace hardware. The reasoning for this suggestion should be obvious: you don't want to start fixing something that isn't the problem. I spent hours and hours figuring out that the problem initially identified by the poster was due to overheating. I called Dell and they told me that without warranty I'd have to buy a new laptop (comparable is about $1000) or have a service technician come on site (to my home) (cost = $400). In fact, just to speak to the service technician was going to cost $60 but the guy was nice and said since I had basically self diagnosed the problem he'd directly route me to the technician and not charge me the fee. I called up geek squad and they were going to charge a $70 diagnostic fee to figure out what I had already identified and have defined for you above and would then charge me for parts and labor to replace the heat sink. Note, this was all before I actually opened up my machine and realized that the internal heat sink grid was clogged. Thus, I went from potentially having to spend $1000 to spending $8 (because I disassembled my heat sink, I now to replace the thermal adhesive to restore the uniform interface it shared with the C/GPU).
It pays to be knowledgable about these things - it pays big time! In the past I would have probably wrote the problem off to being a broken machine and bought a new one.
It also is helpful to understand what the mechanism underlying the problem of overheating is (as I have outlined above) because a few other things should be intuitively obvious:
i. if your system is overheating, use it extremely sparingly so you permanently damage any of the hardware (and don't run high processing features like video and games)
ii. if the problem is heat you can use an external cooling system. the external cooling pads at best decrease the C/GPU temperates by 10 degrees C, thus if your system is at 100 degree C that's not going to do too much. However, if you set up the computer in a cold environment with active convection (I put my laptop on a wire cookie sheet to elevate it and then had a powerful area fan blow over and under it to make sure I could run the diagnostics without the system shutting itself down). Let me tell you, that fan was doing alot more than the power that could be transferred via a USB connection.
Recommendations:
R1 When using a laptop always use an external cooling pad. Despite what I wrote above, when your system is running normally without excessive temperatures, this marginal decrease in temperature will increase the overall lifetime of your laptop.
R2. Install the software that allows you to monitor your C/GPU temperatures continuously (many different programs available - just do google search).
R3. Disassemble your heat sink and fan at least annually (I have heard every 8 months) and clean the dust from the fan and heat sinks and replace the thermal adhesive. The time frame will obviously depend on how often and how intensely you use your computer and also the cleanliness of the environment it is in.
R4. Do NOT rely on Dell customer service. They are designed to make money and recommend "well you might need a new computer, it is probably the better option anyway" }:(
R5. Be wary of Dell! This may come as a shock and it came to a shock to me as well. After surveying the forums in detail dell has recently gone to using nVidia boards and Windows 7, both of which allegedly are notorioius for (have notoriously) caused overheating problems and as you have all experienced, as I have read, and as I have experienced, Dell support staff is not what it used to be and don't actually solve the problem. Not in one location after surveying these forums did I find anything about the problem possibly being due to a clogged system inaccessible via the external vents. I happened to find a video tutorial that explained how to replace the thermal adhesive and it was mentioned there (sorry, forget link). Thus, my conclusion is that the support staff does not actually understand what it is telling you, and concludes you need a service member or need to send your laptop in to get it fixed when in fact, you can fix most problems for free. And it makes me angry that they would charge you $60+ to do diagnostics, something that is already built into your system and they could explain with about 1 minute of assistance. To emphasize this point, I will not buy another a Dell.
R6. When working inside your laptop, note that you don't actually need any sort of certification to do this work. However, note that if you don't have an intuitive understanding of electronics that you might want to actually pay for this. Disassembling your computer can be a daunting process and the first time you go there is an inherent trial and error aspect to it. There are certain features of the Studio 1735 that are highly susceptible to damage if not handled properly. If you follow the directions precisely you have nothing to worry about. However, if you skim them and miss something, you could be looking at an expensive bill and dysfunctional laptop after you put everything back together. The key to successfully working inside your laptop is having the right tools for the job. A set of small philips head and flat head screw drivers and a set of needle nose plyers (preferably grounded with rubber covering) are ideal. If you are super sensitive about the aesthetics case you can get a plastic stylus (forget the precise name) that is designed to pop out certain click-n-lock hardware components, but a gingerly used small flat head screwdriver does this trick just fine.
Finally, please forward this. I have spent an hour writing this up for your benefit! Please pass this forward. As it will undoubtedly prove invaluable to you, please help out another user with this information by finding one additional post and forwarding this information there. Also, if a dell representative ever finds this, please at teh very least cut and paste whatever pertinent sections you feel are appropriate into your troubleshooting guide as the current help guidelines are, well, unhelpful.

Ghost Train

A number of dell laptops have a problem with nvidia chipsets, if some of the issues are graphics related might be worth checking if the laptop is on the list
http://en.community.dell.com/dell-blogs/b/direct2dell/archive/2008/08/18/nvidia-gpu-update-dell-to-offer-warranty-enhancement-to-all-affected-customers-worldwide.aspx

had to argue with dell about a certain laptop affected with this problem for them to repair it

BostonB

What gfx does the 1735 have. ATI or Nvidia?

She gets the problem when not gaming which maybe suggests its not the gfx. or at least not just the gfx card.

Flojo

She* sorry couldn't resist


Hmm the link doesn't include the studio 1735 and says limited warranty enhancement and that was back in 08 so I doubt they would do anything for me now. Well as I mentioned if I have a lot of programs running then try something simple like a facebook game it freaks out and shuts off.. so you could be right about it being graphics related!
Mine is an ATI, a guy msged me on this saying he'll take a look.. so might upgrade myself to a nice shiney Nvidia, if thats the problem

Thanks again for responses!

BostonB

A facebook game wouldn't use much power. ATI doesn't have the problem.

You can't upgrade gfx cards in a laptop, not economically anyway.

Ghost Train

Sorry didn't spot you had mentioned the model

if it's not listed then it wouldn't be covered and dell would be pretty aware of this issue

Flojo

Ah ok so I guess I'm kinda back to square one really. It probably just needs a good blast with a can of condensed air or something! Fairly sickened though as I'm ment to start back raiding with my mates, they're down a tank

BostonB

If it were me I'd take off the heatsinks and put some proper thermal paste on them. Assuming you are happy opening the laptop. Also checking that the fan is indeed working. Do you hear it running?

http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/1735/en/sm/cpucool.htm?~file=/systems/1735/en/sm/cpucool.htm

Theres also another possibility that some of the ram has gone bad. In which case you can run a test on that. Or remove half of it, test, then do the same with the other half.

Considering that it boots and runs. There can't be that much wrong with it.

Flojo

I have already opened it.. noticed some discolouration on the panel that is opposite the fan. Thermal pasting might be a bit too hardcore for me to try hehe, but thanks for the heads up! Fan is working anyways, seems to be going at the right speed but right when it is about to shut off it starts going crazy and speeding up, then it just dies.

BostonB

I suggest you take it into a repair shop. Ask them to put new good quality thermal paste on the heatsink. Then get them to install software that will throttle back the CPU to a slower speed. You could try the latter yourself.

http://www.diefer.de/speedswitchxp/

Flojo

Cool thanks for the link hun

I'll see what the guy who pm'd me can do first then I'll defo try that place that was mentioned if nothing can be done there.