Laptop thermal fuse

[trulytest]

Hi guys,
I have just laptop with "shutdowning problems" - he just shutdown randomly. But I think it is overheating, coz when something is launched (game for example) the laptop shuts down. You know this is old Compaq Evo N110 laptop, and I hear that they set up the overheating temperature around 60 Celsius (yeah, nonsense). So I am asking is there on mobo some thermal fuse or? And it is possible to unsolder it or get it off?

 

[GreenGiant]

its probably not a thermal fuse, its probably a thermistor or something like that, when it reaches a certain point it shuts everything off to protect the laptop

If you bypass it then you risk damaging the laptop, and/or hurting yourself (many stories of laptops burning people/catching fire)

 

[Jotto]

Would be foolish to remove the protection from the unit. They don't spend money on parts that are not needed. But this type of device is usually on a power supply, which yours is not inside the unit. The battery supplies the voltage, and is charged by a external unit.

Check the airflow, the fan and if you can get inside the unit any heatsink you see to see if the thermal paste is dried out.

Would also check any electrolytic capacitor, if you have a ESR meter that would be a great help to you. If you have no experience in this fielld, I would not try this or taking the unit apart.

Get some canned air and see how much dust you have around the fan and exhaust ports.

 

[KrisBlueNZ]

I agree with Jotto's advice. It's probably shutting down because it's overheating; it's probably overheating because the cooling system is inadequate.

I have a Toshiba laptop that has the same problem. You can get software that displays the core temperature(s) on the screen, so you can see how it behaves when you run different software on the machine, and you can confirm that this is what's happening. Google CPU core temperature.

I think it's also possible that the devices in your laptop are dissipating more heat than they should because they draw more current than they should because of increased operating and leakage current.

I believe this can be caused by degradation caused by overheating, which sounds paradoxical but which may initially have been caused by running the laptop with the ventilation inlet and/or outlet blocked. This is why you should never put a laptop on a soft surface like a couch, or even worse, directly on a bed.

Also, it's possible to buy a laptop cooler which sits under the laptop and blasts a strong flow of air into the ventilation slots under the laptop (if the air inlet is in the bottom), to help the built-in cooling system.

 

[trulytest]

I tried a lot of programs including SpeedFan and HWMonitor, but it can't find out any information. It is just displaying the temperature frozen at 40 Celsius, and thats all. It can't detect anything, SpeedFan only shows that frozen 40 Celsius and CPU usage, thats all (it shows an error in the top:
Scanning VIA SMBus at $8080
INFO: unable to use VIA686 sensors (bad I/O BASE)

The stupid thing is that it has really primitive BIOS (PhoenixBIOS 4.0). You can't set up there anything (seriously, nothing). When I tried to flash it with floppy with "the newest" version on hp site, it just showed the blicking "_" and that was all.