Dell laptop has hardware problems. CPU?
 

Hi,

I have a Dell Inspiron 6000 running fedora 11. Recently it has slowed down and began to freeze doing normal tasks. It used to run quite well. It now has trouble booting and if I'm lucky it will work for 5 minutes before it freezes completely. I tried booting from USB to a live OS but it was the same. The hard drive is fine.


When I booted it there was a message that it didn't recognize the power supply. I bought a new power supply but that made no difference. Sometimes it freezes before the POST so its not an OS problem either.

What could it be?

Sounds like a bad motherboarder, to me. What "trouble booting" do you have? Booting at the BIOS level, or via GrUB?

Yeah it freezes before I can get into the BIOS and before GRUB. Sometimes it boots OK then freezes later on.

I've had symptoms like yours that were due to a massive build up of the /var/log/messages file. Mine was due to a problem with a printer driver. If the file is GB's big and is filling up your root and the computer is working off of swap, it will slow & bog down everything. Just a thought, check it out.

The problem is not with the OS because I tried a live OS and it was the same.

Could be something plugging the cooling vents or the CPU Heatsink could be plugged with dust. I would get some canned air and blow out the cooling vents and fins.

Is the battery in the laptop charged? Did you replace with a Dell power supply or a universal one?

When the PC doesn't recognize the power supply that sometimes causes strange issues, because there is not enough power to run things. I have had three Dell Laptop Power Supplies fail (from people wrapping the cords tightly and breaking the wires. In all cases the power supply would not charge the battery.

I hoped that was it. I just took the laptop apart and gave it a good cleaning but no difference. The heatsink was packed with dust though.
I have two different power cords and the laptop reacts the same to both.

Check the solder joint at the power connector. If it does not seem cracked when you wiggle it, then it is not the power connector. If it seems cracked, you will have to resolder it. If the battery have a level indicator light, check it. If the battery is charged, disconnect the battery and reconnect it.

Try disconnecting the hard drive and then boot up the computer. If it still have the same problems, then you have a power supply problem that is in the motherboard and not your power supply brick. Another thing you can try is disconnect the LCD monitor from your notebook computer and test. If the computer lasts longer with the LCD monitor disconnected and the hard drive is connected, you might have to replace the LCD driver board. Unfortunately, you might have to get a new computer if disconnecting devices does not provide a fix because notebook motherboards costs around $200 to $500.

One thing you could do is reset the BIOS by removing all batteries and its power supply brick. If you do remove all batteries even the CMOS battery, it may take a while to have the BIOS be reset. Try finding a jumper for a CMOS reset, so you do not have to wait a long time. The length of time that you may have to wait if you remove all batteries and not use the CMOS jumper reset, could be a day (24 hours) to a week.

I suggest check fans to make sure they are spinning at a high enough speed to move air.

Hi, my laptop is also practially freezing and I can hear it swapping,
but don't know why (its a fedora10 running on a Dell, in a small partition with not much free space left, maybe 1GB).
You say that you have a massive build up of the messages file: what do you mean by a massive build up?
In my case it looks like a wlan problem that appears for no reason (sometimes, as in this case, when I opened the lid and wanted to unlock the system, sometimes using adobe acroread reader and firefox)
I write below part of my /var/log/messages.

My big question would be: how can I see what the swapping was all about
(it sounded like when it is booting),
and also,
in my older systems I could type Ctrl-F1 to Ctrl-F7 and would get another terminal without graphics.
Is there something like that under fedora?


from /var/log/messages:
Jan 17 02:31:53 fpfedora NetworkManager: <info> Wireless now disabled by radio killswitch
Jan 17 02:32:30 fpfedora NetworkManager: <info> (wlan0): device state change: 8 -> 2
Jan 17 02:32:30 fpfedora NetworkManager: <info> (wlan0): deactivating device (reason: 0).
Jan 17 02:32:34 fpfedora NetworkManager: <info> wlan0: canceled DHCP transaction, dhcp client pid 7843
Jan 17 02:35:43 fpfedora NetworkManager: <WARN> check_one_route(): (wlan0) error -34 returned from rtnl_route_del(): Sucess#012
Jan 17 02:35:44 fpfedora avahi-daemon[2399]: Withdrawing address record for 192.168.1.105 on wlan0.
Jan 17 02:35:44 fpfedora ntpd[7831]: sendto(200.80.32.172) (fd=22): Invalid argument
Jan 17 02:35:50 fpfedora ntpd[7831]: sendto(200.11.116.1) (fd=22): Invalid argument
Jan 17 02:35:50 fpfedora avahi-daemon[2399]: Leaving mDNS multicast group on interface wlan0.IPv4 with address 192.168.1.105.
Jan 17 02:35:50 fpfedora avahi-daemon[2399]: Interface wlan0.IPv4 no longer relevant for mDNS.
Jan 17 02:35:55 fpfedora ntpd[7831]: Deleting interface #5 wlan0, 192.168.1.105#123, interface stats: received=158, sent=161, dropped=2, activ
e_time=7760 secs
Jan 17 02:36:19 fpfedora kernel: iwl3945 0000:0c:00.0: PCI INT A disabled
Jan 17 02:36:23 fpfedora avahi-daemon[2399]: Withdrawing address record for fe80::21c:bfff:fe8c:83e7 on wlan0.
Jan 17 02:36:28 fpfedora ntpd[7831]: Deleting interface #4 wlan0, fe80::21c:bfff:fe8c:83e7#123, interface stats: received=0, sent=0, dropped=0
, active_time=7799 secs

Bye,
Fritz