Laptop Overheating issue

Hi everyone.

I am new here and looking forward to sharing & learning hints, tips etc. Its a pleasure to be here.

I thought though that I would share this interesting issue with those of you experts in that field.

I have an Acer 6920G laptop which recently was victim of a cider spillage over the front touchpad. I didnt panic and took the required action by turning it off straight away and drying the spillage.

I inspected inside to find it had actually got onto a motherboard connector for the touchpad/click buttons which explained why they were no longer working. So I ordered a new touchpad / connector strip and all is fine. Then more recently linked or not, the laptop has a problem with overheating occasionally.

Basically it would turn itself off randomly after high CPU activity or during gaming when temps got high into 90C plus. So I did some investigating to understand the main fan that both the CPU & GPU heatsink run to was not working as expected and running intermittently.

I ordered a new fan to test and replaced it to no avail. What happens is that the fan sometimes runs, sometimes “forgets” and therefore the system runs into high temps causing a shutdown. Interestingly, I have found that simply unplugging the fan from the motherboard and then replugging back in starts it up again and all is fine until the next time it fails to start.

Any ideas what on earth this could be? I assume the fan turns on according to temp and does not run all the time? We know its not the fan as both fans do the same, so is it the motherboard or something else?

If I need a new board I will probably get a new laptop but I am hoping it is repairable…

Thanks for any assistance

Matt

Hi,

Sometimes you can adjust fan settings in the BIOS. I would check in there to see if anything doesnt look right with the fan. There are also some utilities that can monitor and control fans from windows http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php. The other thing may be a faulty temperature sensor on the system board. If its reading an incorrect temperature it may be powering the fan down to a low speed because it thinks it is not needed. You could also try reapplying thermal paste to the cpu and the heatsink/fan that is on top of it. Just be sure to clean them both first to remove the old paste. If the paste has gotten old or wasnt put on correctly, it could be causing heating issues. I use arctic silver compound on my pc for thermal paste.