Laptop overheating - ideas?

Hardware & Tech Questions
1

Hi guys.

I’m having a spot of trouble with my wife’s laptop and any help would be appreciated. She was using it last week when the screen suddenly went black and it stopped responding. Since then, whenever it is switched on it does the same thing again after a minute or two, black screen and completely unresponsive. It doesn’t matter if I boot into Windows normal, safe mode, or into the bios the result is the same. It looks very much like an overheating shutdown but I can’t trace the cause.

I replaced the battery as the capacity was getting low and Lenovo laptops have this weird power cycle known issue where they get stuck in a hibernation mode. I also went through the discharge power and reset process to fix that a couple of times just in case.

I removed and replaced the thermal paste on the CPU. The original paste was pretty much dried and cracking but nothing unexpected in a 6 year old laptop.

I removed, dusted, and re-seated the RAM stick though there was nothing particularly out of the ordinary there.

I transferred the NVME hard drive into my desktop and ran CHKDSK and SFC on it. There were some errors with the FST but nothing terminal and they were easily repaired. SFC reported all clear. I stress tested it for half an hour or so with no issues and kept an eye on the temp - it only reached about 38 degC. When I put it back the laptop just kept on crashing.

I checked the heatsink and fan for dust / debris and they were surprisingly clean (cleaner than my gaming desktop). The fan does spin on startup but then stops and only sometimes starts spinning again before the crash, and it never gets up enough speed to be audible. Could a cooling fan still turn and be broken at the same time?

I’ve tried to monitor CPU temps prior to the crash but the results were very inconsistent. One time the max core was sitting at 94 degC and the laptop lasted 3 minutes (the fan still didn’t spin up to audible though) and another time all cores remained below 54 degC and the crash happened after about a minute.

The laptop is quite an old Lenovo Ideapad 3 with an Intel i5 processor, 4 Gb RAM, and a 512 Gb Intel NVME hard drive. It’s only used for work and has been super reliable in the past.

Anyone have any bright ideas? I don’t really want to have to fork out for a new laptop just for work :winking_face_with_tongue: .

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

2

Hello, Can you get into BIOS? IF so try and see if you can monitor the temp and fan speed. if it got up to 94c and the fan was not near maxxed out I would say something wrong with the fan curve or the fan is on its way out..

If you think it is heat based I would check into the fan. you seemed to have covered all the other bases. so maybe replace the fan..but check the fan curve 1st if you have one..

3

Ideas to cover all bases:

  • Connect to a power outlet
  • Run memtest86+, anything red means RAM has gone bad
  • Definitely unplug everything that can be unplugged
  • Reinstall OS / run something from USB stick and run intense benchmarks
  • Observe temp curves
  • Try max fan speed (noisy but will give you new insight)
  • Visually inspect for popped capacitors
4

Thanks for the suggestions.

I changed the fan curve to max performance and it now sounds like a turboprop on startup so I think the fan is fine. The crash still occurs at about the same time and the temps stay below 85 degC so I don’t think it’s the CPU overheating. I am going to swap the RAM for one in my laptop and see if that’s the issue, but if not I will have to turn to my option of last resort - writing a business proposal for a new laptop :smile:

5

Try first by removing all the RAM stocks and reboot the Laptop, but putting just one at a time, checking them all for some more sneaky issues.

6

There’s only one RAM slot I’m afraid.

7

Ouch. Then yes, you need a spare stick

8

Or, as pony suggested, run memtest.