[ceck]

My sons 2 and 1/2 yo laptop was playing up and duly out of warranty. He pulled it apart thinking that a previous on-going problem of shut down was caused by overheating - lint fluff etc around the heat sink, fins etc. The copper heat sink and fins looked relatively clean but we found some crap between the back of the chip and heat sink. Cleaned it all down with alcohol and a tech mate at work suggested Arctic Freeze as the required bond between the two. Any suggestions for anything else. Could a faulty memory card do the same???

[Supatard]

I gather your mate was referring to http://www.arcticsilver.com/arctic_silver_...al_adhesive.htm Which is indeed top notch. Comes in both adhesive and normal paste.

There are a few ways to hunt down problems. Starting with looking through the event logs in your administrative tools section of the control panel. Most crashes will leave evidence.

With the memory, you can run a memtest. There are plenty of them about on the net. or theres one built into win7.

Happy to help with the diagnosis, will need more detailed information about the problem and any error messages etc.

[ceck]

I gather your mate was referring to http://www.arcticsilver.com/arctic_silver_...al_adhesive.htm Which is indeed top notch. Comes in both adhesive and normal paste.

There are a few ways to hunt down problems. Starting with looking through the event logs in your administrative tools section of the control panel. Most crashes will leave evidence.

With the memory, you can run a memtest. There are plenty of them about on the net. or theres one built into win7.

Happy to help with the diagnosis, will need more detailed information about the problem and any error messages etc.

This is embarrassing because we didn't know about articsilver and whilst my feeble mind was telling me that there should be a "conductor" between both parts we elected to put a thin layer of bluetack which i guess would typically be an "insulator". So the conundrum is that since Sat night it has been working well. That doesn't mean the bluetack shouldn't be removed etc but could also suggest that something else was causing the problem. The laptop was in pieces all over the computer table with yellow stickies identifying parts, assembly sequence and screw groupings so maybe in reassembly things were clipped together more positively or whatever. Nevertheless thanks for the tips and will try to run some of those tests this weekend for Vista.
PS Just opened it up now without it being started today and everything is up and running.

[Supatard]

I'm very glad we had this chat... I would hasten to remedy the bluetack situation, as there is a significant chance of doing damage to the CPU. Were it not a laptop cpu, it would likely have let its magic smoke out already. And there is a small risk of fire.

Great idea with the assembly notes and tags.

[megareg]

Definately remove the blutack.The heatsink compound, Artic whatever or its equivalent products should be used with a very thin smear, I usually spread a very small amount over the CPU and move the heatsink around the CPU in a circular motion with a bit of downforce.

I do it that way because all a heatsink compound does is to just replace the minute air bubbles that may exist between the CPU and the heatsink, remember that air is a good insulator, and since the surfaces of the CPU and heatsink will have some sort of "hills and valleys" the heatsink compound will replace those air gaps and provide better thermal conductivity, you don't need huge blobs of the stuff, thats almost as bad as blutack.

You could try some silicon grease or "o" ring grease, I have some silicon grease that I use for sealing my swimming pool filter seals, same stuff and you'll probably find that the heatsink compound is probably some sort of silicon grease too.

Hope that explains the purpose of the stuff.

Cheers
Reg.

[macrocephalic]

Just on that note. I remember years ago Dans data did some experiments and found that thermal paste isn't really a very good conductor of heat, it's just the best permanent solution. Water works a lot better, but only lasts a few minutes. Vegemite also works quite well, but only lasts an hour or two. Both of these have a problem with drying out - which real thermal paste shouldn't do.

I also remember someone (I think it might have been Cathar from OCAU) doing some analysis to determine just how much better heatsink compunds could get, he determined that if a thermal paste could be made with the same conduction properties as copper (which would be the holy grail of thermal pastes) then it would only make something like 1 degree celsius difference to actual core temperatures.

What I'm really trying to say here is, get the bluetack out of there and put some actual thermal paste on, but don't worry if you get the generic white paste instead of the expensive Arctic Silver.

If the PC is randomly restarting then I'd look at the memory. Ultimately it could be quite a few things though. If it becomes a problem then I'd evaluate just how much value there is in a 2.5 year old laptop when you can get a new functioning laptop for $500.

[Earp]

The problem you have with the silver based compounds is shorting it your not careful. Try to get a silicon based one. If your not gameing and overclocking the fraction of a percent that silver gives you isn't worth it. What we used to say to customers is you smear the paste on the use an old razor to wipe it even. All its there for is to smooth out the imperfections in the cpu top and allow the heat to pass for the top of the cpu into the heatsink and then dispate.

When you pull a computer apart get an eraser and wipe it over to clean the 'gold fingers' sometimes its just tarnish that is causeing the issue. We had a faulty DVD drive that kept shuting a system down not to long ago and we only worked out if was the DVD drive because I didn't put it back in when I did a boot test. Replaced the DVD drive and she works again.

If you think it is an overheating issue download a program called speccy www.piriform.com it will tell you whats in you computer and what temp the parts are running at and you can watch it to see if it is overheating.....sometimes they shutdown for other reasons than overheating.