Hi, I just set up my account and need help with something. Hopefully this will be brief. Skip to bold red text at the end for the short story.
My laptop (Acer Aspire 5750G), 3 years old, failed me about 2 weeks ago. I left it on overnight, in the morning the screen was frozen and after shutting it down it wouldn't restart for a few hours. Eventually I reinstalled the system, but it didn't really fix the problem. The laptop was functional, but erratic and often showing I/O errors. I ran some disk checks, and found quite a lot of bad sectors. So many bad sectors that the diagnostic software tools crashed. I used several and don't remember off the top of my head which.
So I had the hard drive changed from a 500GB 5400rpm HDD to a 500GB 7200rpm HDD. I thought I might aswel upgrade while I'm at it. I asked the repair people if the higher rpms would be compatible with the general "mechanics" of the laptop so to speak. They said no problem.
The new hard drive works well... and everything is much faster. But now my laptop is overheating. I asked the people in the same repair shop again what the problem is. They say that the laptop probably just needs a thorough clean inside and some maintenance and quoted some technical stuff about replacing some "gells" or something which apparently help with heat conduction. I know very little about these kinds of details. They also said that a higher rpm hard drive will consume more power, and a new hard drive by it's nature will run faster and also consume more power... but still they insisted that cleaning the ventillation will be good enough.
My laptop had been working up a lot of heat before all this happened, and possibly contributed to my previous hard drive's failure, but my laptop never turned itself off because of it. Now this is a regular thing. Also if the overheating was critical enough to "fry" my hard drive, surely my CPU and Graphics Card would have suffered first? (both show no faulty symptoms). So the whole point of this thread is to ask this:
Is upgrading the rpms of my laptop's hard drive from 5400rpms to 7200rpms actually a good idea? Is this causing my laptop to overheat? Will simply "cleaning" the ventillation system work? Or do I need to somehow "upgrade" my ventillation system? Or should I downgrade my hard drive back to 5400rpms? Or upgrade to an SSD which runs on much less power from what I know off, overheats less because of it, and is actually faster.
My only bother with an SSD is I'm not sure a 3 year old Acer Aspire laptop is worth me spending that kind of money on to upgrade it. I'm probably going to buy a new laptop in the next 3 months anyway. Either way, I am definitely going to get it cleaned professionally and looked at (no DYI this time). I just really need to know if this will likely be enough to fix the problem.
Another possibility I'm unsure of, is that somehow whatever software which operates the fan, has been installed incorrectly. Some driver I presume. I say this because I don't hear the fan working at variable speeds. It is difficult to tell though because it is very quiet.
Thanks for any help. I searched the internet quite a bit and didn't find a similar situation to mine.
My laptop (Acer Aspire 5750G), 3 years old, failed me about 2 weeks ago. I left it on overnight, in the morning the screen was frozen and after shutting it down it wouldn't restart for a few hours. Eventually I reinstalled the system, but it didn't really fix the problem. The laptop was functional, but erratic and often showing I/O errors. I ran some disk checks, and found quite a lot of bad sectors. So many bad sectors that the diagnostic software tools crashed. I used several and don't remember off the top of my head which.
So I had the hard drive changed from a 500GB 5400rpm HDD to a 500GB 7200rpm HDD. I thought I might aswel upgrade while I'm at it. I asked the repair people if the higher rpms would be compatible with the general "mechanics" of the laptop so to speak. They said no problem.
The new hard drive works well... and everything is much faster. But now my laptop is overheating. I asked the people in the same repair shop again what the problem is. They say that the laptop probably just needs a thorough clean inside and some maintenance and quoted some technical stuff about replacing some "gells" or something which apparently help with heat conduction. I know very little about these kinds of details. They also said that a higher rpm hard drive will consume more power, and a new hard drive by it's nature will run faster and also consume more power... but still they insisted that cleaning the ventillation will be good enough.
My laptop had been working up a lot of heat before all this happened, and possibly contributed to my previous hard drive's failure, but my laptop never turned itself off because of it. Now this is a regular thing. Also if the overheating was critical enough to "fry" my hard drive, surely my CPU and Graphics Card would have suffered first? (both show no faulty symptoms). So the whole point of this thread is to ask this:
Is upgrading the rpms of my laptop's hard drive from 5400rpms to 7200rpms actually a good idea? Is this causing my laptop to overheat? Will simply "cleaning" the ventillation system work? Or do I need to somehow "upgrade" my ventillation system? Or should I downgrade my hard drive back to 5400rpms? Or upgrade to an SSD which runs on much less power from what I know off, overheats less because of it, and is actually faster.
My only bother with an SSD is I'm not sure a 3 year old Acer Aspire laptop is worth me spending that kind of money on to upgrade it. I'm probably going to buy a new laptop in the next 3 months anyway. Either way, I am definitely going to get it cleaned professionally and looked at (no DYI this time). I just really need to know if this will likely be enough to fix the problem.
Another possibility I'm unsure of, is that somehow whatever software which operates the fan, has been installed incorrectly. Some driver I presume. I say this because I don't hear the fan working at variable speeds. It is difficult to tell though because it is very quiet.
Thanks for any help. I searched the internet quite a bit and didn't find a similar situation to mine.
