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Erkki

Damn it, but computers have become really complicated

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If anything crops up, you can also use AMD Overdrive (part of Catalyst Driver Suite) to lower the power consumption like this:

 

powersettings.PNG

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My laptop seems to be super hot and super broken. My current theory is that there is a goblin trying to cook a fry up on my CPU. It's a fancy Asus affair with a slightly outdated i7 and has been freezing quite alarmingly. It just locks up completely, usually within a few minutes to an hour of turning it on. I thought it was an overheating issue so took it apart and gave everything a clean, which fixed the problem for about a week. Now the problem has returned. The idle core temperatures are about 60 and they seem to get close to 100 before locking up (however this is difficult to prove as I've been unable to overheat it while CoreTemp is in sight. What would YOU do in this situation?

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When this happened to me it turned out that the thermic paste between the cpu and the cooling element had decayed/crumbled. Replacing it with some 'arctic silver' fixed things.

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Thanks thumbs. Thermal paste was my guess too however the prospect of unseating the CPU was too frightening. Come to think of it there was an odd white powder in the vents which looked pretty new. Looks like I'll have to bite the bullet. Maybe I'll find a home for the three disposed screws from last time I disassembled it.

How would one 'check the power pack'?

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Luckily in modern computers unseating heatsinks and the like is pretty trivial. White paste definitely points towards the budget thermal paste falling apart, probably due to some shocks.

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Check it for fleas with a delousing comb. The fleas make it overheat.

 

No but as Os says the thermal paste sounds like the culprit.  A syringe of thermal paste should only cost about a £5er, less if the computer shop guy is really impressed with your knowledge of Arctic Silver.

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Premo paste ordered. Everything I've heard since about 2008 is there is nothing to fear. Intuitively it still feels like something that should be difficult.

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Now I want a Surgeon Simulator mod where you have to fix computers.

That would be significantly more stressful! Instead of a blood loss meter for the patient there would be a blood loss meter for the player character which would deplete as they lacerated their hands.

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I spent the past 2 weekends trying to get my desktop working again.  After scrapping my RAID (for the 2nd time), I finally managed to get Windows 7 installed on it.  It seems to work, except for the part where the graphics drivers keep screwing up and I can't see what I'm doing because the screen went black, then after a clean reinstall blue, then after another reinstall froze...

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Hmmm... So I may have destroyed my graphics card or forgotten to plug the screen in. I decided to change the paste on both the GPU and CPU. The CPU was presumably a success as I was able to boot and log into Windows. The only fault I can identify is a complete lack of any visual output on the screen or HDMI. My current theories are that a) I bridged something on the GPU or B) I didn't plug the weird mushy cables in properly. My partner has banned me from working on it until tomorrow.

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