Dell laptop problem.

[Shoeberto]

My sister's laptop has some sort of weird problem. Sometimes, when you run it for a while, it just locks up completely. After soft powering it down, it doesn't always boot up again. Pressing the power button causes the status light to pop on, like usual, but then all that happens is the Caps Lock button flashes on and off for a while. Sometimes it will turn on, but running it even for a little bit causes another complete lock up.

Any advice?

[Yamaneko]

Overheating? Try leaving the laptop off for a while after a lockup and see if you can use it for longer periods of time. Can you give us some temp readouts from BIOS?

[Shoeberto]

I thought it was heat, too. I took some compressed air and blew out a lot of dust, but that didn't help much.

I just looked through the BIOS and it doesn't have any temperature readouts.

[bipper]

It really sounds like a heat issue to me But then again its hard to tell from the description.

How old is it, what type processor and spped, model type would help to. If your willing to take it apart do so and look for any obvious burns. What Os are you running, what other software. What was it running when it crashes does it matter?

Bipper

[Samuraid]

For the heck of it, you could also try running MemTest on it. It's worth a try, I've seen laptops suffer from memory problems before.

[Shoeberto]

The lock ups don't seem to be caused by any one program I can recognize. It seems random. Last week I installed MS Anti-spyware, and running a full scan caused a lock up, but just now I installed about 25 security updates off Windows Update and didn't have any problems.

Specs:
Dell Inspiron 600m
Intel Pentium M 1.3ghz
256mb RAM
XP Home SP1

[bipper]

Ah gotchya ..

I actually have a friends computer that acts this same way. It is not a laptop, but it has a tendancy to *think* it is over heating and spyware removers (we prefer spybot s&d) cause a lock up.

The basic cure we found was that the housing case for the precessor was cracked... from god knows what. And no matter what the dell user manual says.. don't use ice....

Outside of that I got nothing atm. I won't be able to sleep.. till... I ... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Bipper

[Yamaneko]

I really dislike how Dell insists on putting only 256MB of RAM in their systems. The bare minimum to enjoy today's systems is 512MBs of RAM, and 1024MBs of RAM is heaven-sent.