System powers down unexpectedly

[sparkster]

Hello! I have a system that powers itself off within minutes of powering on and it doesn't seem to log the event. It hasn’t yet crashed in safe mode, but it crashed when running a memory test from the windows boot screen (it made it through the first pass and almost to the end of the second pass before powering down).

Here’s the kicker: The BIOS reads the temperature as 93 to 101C, which seems impossibly high. Both the airflow and the heat sinks feel reasonably cool.

In the control panel, “Automatic restart” is unchecked and "Write an Event to the system log" is checked, though no event is written.

My presumption: The temperature sensor is incorrectly reading about 50C hotter than reality. In safe mode it doesn’t read hot enough to power down, but normal mode and memory tests put it over the edge. However, I would have expected it to power down long before it reached water’s boiling point.

It’s a PentiumD 830 (S) DC 3.0 GHz on an ASUS P5LP-LE motherboard (HP m7170n computer) running Vista SP1. BIOS revision 3.03 05/19/2005

Any thoughts on the cause or methods to diagnose it?

[ShahBoii]

Hi there sparkster,
I have suffered the same problem with my dell dimension 5000 with a petium 4 processer, 2GB ram and 160GB hard drive. The way I solved this problem was do remove the hard drive and place it in another computer as the secondary drive. Was this will do is that when the second computer boots up it will check the disks and the error in your faulty hard drive will be dectected and repaired.

NOTE: Back-up all your data on the second computer. (all the data from the faulty drive can be accessed from the second computer)

Hope that helps,

Regards

~ShahBoii

[Rik_]

It may be worth removing the CPU heatsink and applying a fresh coat of heat transfer paste as it can dry up.

[sparkster]

Thanks for the advice. I'll give the hard drive (I need to back it up, anyway) and then, if still needed, the heat transfer paste a shot over the weekend.

[crunchie]

Sounds like the thermal protection is kicking in. Is the cpu fan spinning up to maximum?
Looks like a bios flash might be in order too, judging by the date there :).

[sparkster]

Sounds like the thermal protection is kicking in. Is the cpu fan spinning up to maximum?
Looks like a bios flash might be in order too, judging by the date there :).

Yeah, the fan stays high:
- CPU Fan speed: 3604 RPM
- System Fan speed: 2920

HP doesn't have a newer BIOS on their download site. ASUS may, but they strongly caution that we should go back to the system manufacturer.

[sparkster]

Thanks everyone! Problem solved, thanks to good advice and Arctic Silver 5 Thermal compound. It took less than 10 minutes to apply the compound and the temperature dropped from over 100C to 60C, about 40 degrees. According to Arctic it will drop another few degrees during a 200 hour break-in period.

I posted this problem on HP's forum and heard nothing. On Daniweb, I received a number of succinct options to try, leading me to a solution. This is a great and powerful community. And, oh by the way, my daughter, Dani, is ecstatic that the problem was solved by her namesake!

[Rik_]

Great news indeed! :)

[sparkster]

You da man!

[Rik_]

Glad I could help! :)