Heat Issue

[thompsonm20]

I was working on an HP laptop 64bit that had excessive amount of dust preventing cooling and the system was running very slow and hot. I cleared the dust and it is running cooler now, however it is still slow. PC doctor will not even boot from DOS and when I run it from windows it is reporting no problems.  I suspect the main board is damaged and was wondering if my assumption is correct. 


Thanks Very Much,

Merlin

[fwilson]

thompsonm20,

This is certainly possible but there may still be hope.

Sometimes when systems overheat for a period of time the thermal compound cooks and looses it's ability to do it's job.  It actually becomes like an insulator.

Before you give up try removing the heatsink, scraping off all of the old compound with a razor blade, cleaning with alcohol then reapplying the thermal compound to the CPU/Heatsink mating surface.

This has brought new life to systems for me and is worth a shot.  Good luck.

-Fred