Diagnosing laptop problems

gnolan

Make: Fujitsu Siemens
Model: Amilo Si 1848
OS: XP Pro SP3

I'm trying to figure out some problems with an old laptop. Some of the problems include intermittent BSODs mentioning NMI: Parity Error. I've posted before on this problem but to no avail - from hours of searching the problem is vague and could be down to a number of things. I know it's not the RAM and the HDD, both having been replaced.

Another problem is the Wireless Network card. I connect to the internet fine (most of the time) but the icon in the System Tray will still say "Acquiring Network Address". I also suffer from random disconnections - it will sometimes reconnect and sometimes will require a restart.

The laptop, i felt, was getting far too hot - i was thinking that the intermittent BSODs may have been a symptom of this overheating. Using core temp the laptop was idling around 50C and got to around 57-61C when playing video. Yesterday I opened up the laptop and cleaned out the fan. I removed the heat sink, cleaned off the thermal paste on the CPU and removed the current (silicon??) cooling pads that were on the GPU and some other things i didn't recognize! I replaced all these with Arctic Silver 5 thermal paste.

The laptop now idles around 34C. It gets to 36C playing 360p video, and peaks around 47C when playing 720p. Obviously much better than the previous results. The problem now, however, is that the fan seems to be on max power the whole time, usually by the time the XP login screen displays.

I have had no BSODs since applying the thermal paste but i don't think that should be taken as any indication of improvement - they were so intermittent that it could happen 3-4 times a day and then once every two weeks.

In summary: BSODs with NMI: Parity Error, temperature better after applying new thermal paste but fan constantly on full, network connectivity problems ("Acquiring Network Address").

Bit of a clusterf**k! Any ideas?

EDIT: About 3 minutes into a 720p video the laptop crashed with the same BSOD.

This is not a screenshot of my laptop but the message is identical. I have tried using Nirsoft Bluescreen Dump but no dump is recorded despite my dump settings being correct.

riclad

TRY running a live cd linux mint ,and see if you still get
wifi problems.THERE should be a few gig free on hd to stop excessive hardrive activity ,as windows uses alot of temp files.
TRY dsl damn small linux , see if fan still slows down,
linux is more effecient than xp,you may have virus,malware thats taking up ram.
try playing video in linux mode.
mint fits on 1cdr , i prefer version from 2010.its smaller.
theres probably a program you can get to reduce fan speed ,depending on cpu temp.
OR backup your data, and do a reinstall of xp.Backup up drivers
to a cdr or usb drive first.

gnolan

riclad wrote: »

TRY running a live cd linux mint ,and see if you still get
wifi problems.THERE should be a few gig free on hd to stop excessive hardrive activity ,as windows uses alot of temp files.
TRY dsl damn small linux , see if fan still slows down,
linux is more effecient than xp,you may have virus,malware thats taking up ram.
try playing video in linux mode.
mint fits on 1cdr , i prefer version from 2010.its smaller.

I'll give linux mint a go and see what happens.

There's plenty of room on the hard drive (100 gigs) and i don't really have excessive hard drive activity.

As far as malware goes i'm quite confident that i'm clean there. Despite a fresh OS install the problems persist. I also uses AVG and MalwareBytes.

gerryR

Try running whocrashed (free version).

Its 50/50 whether it will pinpoint the problem but on occasion it's solved a few BSOD problems for me where a fairly obscure driver was the cause

http://www.resplendence.com/whocrashed

gnolan

If i'm getting the latest version of Mint which version should i download from here given that i'm running XP 32 bit?

Sup08

This one for 32bit.

http://www.linuxmint.com/edition.php?id=99

PrzemoF

OP, I'm not sure if it's part of mint disto, but get something with memtest86 and give it a good go. You replaced the ram, but maybe the new one is broken as well?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memtest

Logical_Bear

possibly the motherboard is acting up?

Torqay

PrzemoF wrote: »

OP, I'm not sure if it's part of mint disto, but get something with memtest86 and give it a good go. You replaced the ram, but maybe the new one is broken as well?

No it's not part of Mint, and it would be the first check I would run.

Why someone recommended a 2 year old linux distro escapes logic. If any, I'd get the current version for better hardware support and up-to-date drivers. Knoppix is a much better choice for diagnostics than some Ubuntu derivative.

Sup08

Torqay wrote: »

No it's not part of Mint, and it would be the first check I would run.

Why someone recommended a 2 year old linux distro escapes logic. If any, I'd get the current version for better hardware support and up-to-date drivers. Knoppix is a much better choice for diagnostics than some Ubuntu derivative.

Also Hiren's boot CD for diagnostics.