Area 51m 7700 Shutting Down, pumping hot air

Hi everyone,

Am new to this forum but have been reading various threads for a few days now about similar problems. Hoping someone can pleeeease help me out here

I've seen several other people experience the following and have seen several possible reasons and fixes, however I'm not convinced my situation is the same just yet. Wondering if anyone has any thoughts on this...

System powers on, posts fine and boots Vista as normal, the cooling fans however do not turn on at any point. This means it heats up, hits an internal threshold and powers off without warning. The fans then spin up to full speed and begin pumping hot air out the rear vent until cool again. The system then remains off.

I've heard some say that it may be the sensor not reporting the temp to the bios, hence the fans don't spin up while the system is running because it thinks everything is hunky dory. However if that were the case you would expect it to never power itself off before spinning up the fans at full speed to prevent frying itself.

Any help would be gratefully appreciated, am going to see if the BIOS reports the running temp at all, to see if there is a sensor problem, as well as open up my case tonight to see if there are any dead or clogged fans, but I think that is unlikely since they spin up just fine when it goes into self preservation mode.

Am really hoping I don't have to buy a new computer at this stage

Hi qhn, thanks for the reply. The very simply answer is never I have been planning to do this since reading a few other threads before posting but have not found a suitable night just yet.

I tried last night to see if the BIOS would report the internal temperatures, but couldn't find any pages with this feature. I have at least one of the latest BIOS revisions as FN+F2 manually spins up my fans to maximum. If I don't do this, the fans never spin up at all.

Has anyone had any success finding an app that will tell you the temperature of all sensors in the system?

thanks heaps, yes will enjoy it I'm sure... from what I've heard the Clevo motherboard should be making these figures available as others have used applications like NHC to see which sensor is returning 0 degrees. I also found Motherboard Monitor (MBM) but this app is old, though so is my motherboard

I had some time last night, powered up the ailing beast and manually cranked the fans to full (FN+F2) and it seemed to be all good as normal. I tried Motherboard Monitor but it didn't know the Clevo brand at all. I then tried a second app called System Information for Windows (SIW) and it did show the values of the temp sensors... HDD 44 degrees celcius and CPU 1 degree.

Not encouraging I must say, would have at least expected it to read 15+ degrees to account for room temperature, 1 degree is just above freezing point so my guess is the sensor is dead.

I would have tried the app you recommended however my laptop soon after froze, yet the HDD was still working away. Had to force it to power down which caused some file corruption (mostly in internet cache though). Tried again and the same lock up occurred.

Opened the case and removed the heatsink to find that there was a serious lack of goop to speak of, and since the system has locked up twice now with the fans running full I'm scared the damage may already have been done. Will try re-gooping the heatsink and see if it still wants to live.

Me again, just re-gooped my cpu and cleaned out all the fans and heatsink fins... still no dice I'm afraid.

Have run CPU-ID Hardware Monitor and Notebook Hardware Monitor and both say there is no value coming from my temp sensor. I guess this was the problem after all. Will see what I can do about checking it's wiring but I'm thinking at this point I only have a laptop on life support

Thanks for your help ghn, I'm currently seeking a replacement part while seeing what I can do about testing the heatsink temp sensor.

For what it's worth to anyone reading this that is going through the same, my laptop is surviving well running WOW with the fans spinning at full speed, so no need to worry so long as you remember to hit FN+F2

Will post my findings.