I recently purchased one of these refurbished by Dell from a reseller. It was cheap, has great specs but also some serious issues ( battery catching fire or components running extremely hot ).
These laptops were marketed towards the business and also the gaming community. Therefore they used Intel's latest and greatest ( at the time )P4 Prescott processors. This one came with a 2.8ghz/1meg L2 cache/ 800mhz fsb # SL79k processor. The motherboard uses the Intel 865 chipset. This is all well and good as a desktop pc but a laptop? Serious heat issues here!
After using this "refub" for a few days, it started exhibiting strange behaviours. Locking up in the bios screen, failing to boot at all, locking up after a few mins in windows etc.. A google search showed pretty much all the symptoms other ppl were having.
I could have sent it back for a refund but being stubborn and stupid, I decided to find out what the problem is and how to go about fixing it.
Using Ultimate Boot CD and it's Linux OS, Memtest86 immediately showed ram errors. Ok, swap ram sticks, run 1 stick only, use ram from a good laptop etc... all gave the same errors. Ram was not the problem.
Next was to swap out the processor. All I had available was a Pentium M 1.8ghz which doesnt have a heatspreader. A copper shim took care of that problem
. Restart the laptop and got a bios error stating it doesn't support 266mhz memory or something similar ( should have wrote it down ).
Unplugged the power cord, pulled the battery and the cmos battery out for a few mins to clear the bios then popped it all back together and got to the bios setup screen this time. I was able to boot up using this "trick". The laptop ran slugishly as the processor was locked at 1.1ghz. It also locked up in windows while running 3Dmark2003 after a few times. So it would seem the processor was ok and probably the motherboard was at fault. The heatpipe on the northbridge chipset looked to be burnt as well.
Got another motherboard, popped in the original processor and fired it up. After all that, it still would lock up! Put the Pentium M back in and the laptop finally ran without errors. So, not only was the motherboard cooked but the processor as well.
I had downloaded a fan speed and monitoring program called l8kfanGUI which was designed to take care of the heat issues on a few of these Dell models(inspiron 9100 and XPS generation1).
The chipset and the processor at idle ran at over 55c. They would both hit 70c under load! Even with the 3 fans running at 100% (using l8kfanGUI) it would only drop the temperature about 5c under load. That's much too high to get any type of longevity out of this system.
What to do to solve this problem? A Pentium M is out of the question as the chipset locks it at 1.1ghz. I tried a 1.8ghz and later a 2.2ghz. They both locked at 1.1ghz. The older P4 Northwood processor seemed to be the only other alternative. These aren't as fast as the Prescotts but they don't use nearly as much watts. I bought a 2.4ghz and here's the results...cpu idles at 36c and the northbridge at 43c. Under load using 3Dmark2003 gives 43c and 48c respectively. Problem resolved!
I can't really say if it was worth the time, effort and $300 in parts to fix this laptop but it was a fun project and hopefully may help anyone else out there
who may still be fighting with these things.
These laptops were marketed towards the business and also the gaming community. Therefore they used Intel's latest and greatest ( at the time )P4 Prescott processors. This one came with a 2.8ghz/1meg L2 cache/ 800mhz fsb # SL79k processor. The motherboard uses the Intel 865 chipset. This is all well and good as a desktop pc but a laptop? Serious heat issues here!
After using this "refub" for a few days, it started exhibiting strange behaviours. Locking up in the bios screen, failing to boot at all, locking up after a few mins in windows etc.. A google search showed pretty much all the symptoms other ppl were having.
I could have sent it back for a refund but being stubborn and stupid, I decided to find out what the problem is and how to go about fixing it.
Using Ultimate Boot CD and it's Linux OS, Memtest86 immediately showed ram errors. Ok, swap ram sticks, run 1 stick only, use ram from a good laptop etc... all gave the same errors. Ram was not the problem.
Next was to swap out the processor. All I had available was a Pentium M 1.8ghz which doesnt have a heatspreader. A copper shim took care of that problem
. Restart the laptop and got a bios error stating it doesn't support 266mhz memory or something similar ( should have wrote it down ).Unplugged the power cord, pulled the battery and the cmos battery out for a few mins to clear the bios then popped it all back together and got to the bios setup screen this time. I was able to boot up using this "trick". The laptop ran slugishly as the processor was locked at 1.1ghz. It also locked up in windows while running 3Dmark2003 after a few times. So it would seem the processor was ok and probably the motherboard was at fault. The heatpipe on the northbridge chipset looked to be burnt as well.
Got another motherboard, popped in the original processor and fired it up. After all that, it still would lock up! Put the Pentium M back in and the laptop finally ran without errors. So, not only was the motherboard cooked but the processor as well.
I had downloaded a fan speed and monitoring program called l8kfanGUI which was designed to take care of the heat issues on a few of these Dell models(inspiron 9100 and XPS generation1).
The chipset and the processor at idle ran at over 55c. They would both hit 70c under load! Even with the 3 fans running at 100% (using l8kfanGUI) it would only drop the temperature about 5c under load. That's much too high to get any type of longevity out of this system.
What to do to solve this problem? A Pentium M is out of the question as the chipset locks it at 1.1ghz. I tried a 1.8ghz and later a 2.2ghz. They both locked at 1.1ghz. The older P4 Northwood processor seemed to be the only other alternative. These aren't as fast as the Prescotts but they don't use nearly as much watts. I bought a 2.4ghz and here's the results...cpu idles at 36c and the northbridge at 43c. Under load using 3Dmark2003 gives 43c and 48c respectively. Problem resolved!
I can't really say if it was worth the time, effort and $300 in parts to fix this laptop but it was a fun project and hopefully may help anyone else out there
who may still be fighting with these things.
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