Around six months ago my laptop started mibehaving so badly that i stopped using it completely.
Symptoms
- After a while of using the laptop, it would show CPU usage at 100%
- Even when there was nothing being run
Today i got time to work on getting my laptop back to a running state.
I initially started suspecting the fan/heatsink issue
I ran Speedfan and noticed the following temperature
You can get Speedfan from here
- On boot the temperature was about 37 C
- After a hour of playing videos it bumped up to 63 C
- After an hour and half it bumped up to 75 C
I finally decided to open the laptop to see if the fan was running at all
Thanks to dell for a great service manual that walked me through the steps
(this wasnt the first time i was opening a laptop but it ain't for a noob)
You can find the service manual for Dell Inspiron E1505/6400 here
After stripping it to bare bones.
I found that the system fan wasn't even moving, noticed that there was dust collected that was stopping the fan from moving.
Used an air duster from fry's to clear the dust out completely.
You can get it here
The motor seems to have got fried on the fan since it was restricted to not move at all.
Now the systems seems to be running fine after replacing the fan with one from an older toshiba laptop..
I couldn't find any help on this and hence wrote one for the community.