[today’s run: …]
I’m out at the HQ again, and had the opportunity to stop by daughter’s place in Loveland for a bit. We ate some dinner and then I worked on her laptop.
The neighbor gave her this laptop. It is not a bad machine. It had a bunch of bloatware on it which I slowly cleared out. And it had not had a Windows update in about 3 years so I worked on that. It was getting late, so I brought it back to the hotel with me to finish the numerous updates.
But, then it started dying on me. It would run for about 10 minutes than go completely power-off. It even did that while in the BIOS setup screen.
A bit of googling, and it seems that these machines would do that if they over heat. It doesn’t feel hot. I suspect the heatsink is probably gummed up and the thermal grease is hardened and the thing just isn’t able to dissipate the normal amount of heat.
I’m going to see if I can find a small screwdriver today at Harbor Freight or somewhere, and see if the remaining Radio Shack stores around may have the thermal grease.
I am not a big-time laptop mechanic. But there are some videos online about how to take this one apart.
If I can get it to run reliably, it also needs a memory upgrade and would really benefit with an SSD hard drive, if we get that far.