Gateway Laptop really loud

This is a well made notebook, one of the most solid that Gateway has sold. Support information may be found at: http://support.gateway.com/s/Mobile/...501243nv.shtml

Although it generally shipped with 256 MB, the 600 YGR can support 1 GB of memory, so a memory upgrade should be possible. A hard drive upgrade would also be pretty easy. However, I would put off any upgrade plans until you resolve the noisy fan issue, as it sounds to me like the fan is on its last legs. Clearly, if the notebook is still in warranty, you should call Gateway tech support. If not, well, hopefully someone else on this forum has some suggestions . . .

Hi, I have a laptop gateway m325x, and the fan is running nonstop !!! even when idle its is always running....really noisy...do you know what I could do????

loud fan = nothing but a good clean up (from inside) would do, taking aprt just to get to the fan part for clean up is quite simple (not easy, not hard)
some references as how to open things apart :-)
http://emachines.fizi.ca/guides.php

cheers ...

Thanks, qhn... I Know now I need to clean the heatsink... some people on the net told me it's very dangerous if I don't really know what I'm doing...I opened it and saw the heatsink/fan, it has four screws marked 1,2,3,4...are you sure after I take them out and clean the heatsink it will be just put it back ... and it's done????
Do you know if there's a guide for doing this on a gateway m325x? I just can't find it and I really don't want to ruin my laptop !!!

pretty much so, but before putting it back together, clean out the old thermal paste (or whatever what was left of it) and apply new one (Artic Siver 5 can be a very good replacement) - and tightening the screws back in order as stated, with little pressure as much as possible

have u looked at the referencing guides and pics?
and here http://www.eserviceinfo.com/index.php?what=search2?

if u can get to the heatsink and worrying about taking it apart, try just to can.air and vacuum it from there first and see - might help sometimes

cheers ...

The 600 series sure is solid...9 pounds' worth solid. I have a 600YG2 which is a little newer and it also has an extremely loud fan. It had been loud since day 1. The loudness has to do with the fan being very small and turning at many thousand RPMs.

However, the 1 GB RAM limit is NOT true. My unit is happily running 1.5 GB RAM as a 512 MB + 1 GB stick.

QHN, Its been a long time since you reply to my post, I just didn't take the time to thank you before for your advice...I opened my laptop, removed the heatsink, vacuumed it, removed the old thermal paste and put a new one and now the fan is running really well.
Thank you very much man !!!!!
Cheers !!!

- glad to hear that the info helped out

cheers ...

My 600yg2 didn't have any thermal paste. Cleaning it out and applying some knocked the temperature down 11C and the noise in half.

If the machine had no thermal paste, I'm surprised that it was only 11 C that the temp was lowered by. Usually a computer with no thermal paste between its CPU and heatsink will overheat very quickly, especially with a hot chip like the YG2's P4-M and its pretty small heatsink. My 600YG2 had a thermal pad between its HS and CPU and removing that after four years of use and putting on some good thermal paste in its place did lower temps by about 5-8 C. The thermal pad comes applied on all of the 600YG2 heatsink/fan modules, so I find it hard to believe that yours had none. The thermal pad is a thin coating of black goo on a silvery foil-like sticker on the bottom of the copper heatsink/fan module.

By the way, I think that Gateway has largely improved its fan noise problems. I have a brand-new S-7125C tablet and its fan is pretty quiet when it kicks on. It rarely has to kick on as the little 1.06 GHz Core 2 Duo ULV makes only a small amount of heat. The usual idle core temps are 35-36 C and the motherboard temp is roughly 40 C. I have a classmate with a 15.4" Gateway notebook (unsure of model #) and its fan is pretty quiet too. The only notebooks I see any more with fans that are very audible are some Toshiba models, but they're more of an "I can hear air moving" rather than "Did somebody turn on a hair dryer?" like the 600YG2 was.

I put most of the blame for the loud fans on the fact that the Pentium 4 (and P4-M) was an extremely hot-running chip and far hotter than any previous chip had ever run, so there were teething pains in getting an adequate cooling mechanism worked out. Lots of OEMs between the middle of 2001 and 2004 stuffed P4s and P4-Ms into notebooks and had either massive overheating problems or extremely noisy fans or both. HP had a particularly bad time with their desktop P4 notebooks being both noisy and overheating. AMD sold very few notebook chips then, and the Athlon XP-Ms weren't exactly paragons of thermal efficiency either. Many of them ended up in desktop Socket A boards because of their unlocked multipliers, and more than a few got the bridge mod to become Athlon MPs. It really wasn't until around the time that the Pentium M Dothan debuted that most laptops abandoned the Pentium 4 for a chip that was actually suitable for a laptop. Thankfully today only a few enormous models from Clevo and Eurocom and the likes use hot-running desktop CPUs inside of them any more, so just about every laptop runs a reasonable CPU inside.

Kind of a noob here and sorry for bumping an old topic. I just read through this and just cleaned the heatsink. Helped me out a lot. Before I apply the thermal grease, is the blackish square the place to remove the old grease and apply the new?

Thanks.

imnotdrphil, good to hear about the memory thing. I didn't wanna buy two 512 memory sticks.

yes, the raised metal square in the center of the chip, is where the thermal compound should be applied, in a thin even coat, after cleaning with plain ole rubbing alcohol & a soft paper towel or cloth.

good luck