Couple of days back, my laptop started overheating and got really slow. Not just overheating, it was almost on fire. On further diagnosis, got to understand that the slowness was due to RAM getting full and high CPU cycles. The overheating was because the fan just stopped working. It was doing about 70C.
I called Dell XPS support and they had an engineer at my doorstep in 20 hours. That was too cool. The plan was to replace the heat sink and hard disk. They had a backup motherboard, if there was further damage.
This was the old heat sink and the motherboard. Lot of dust in the fan. The motherboard was replaced one year back with a Nvidia graphics card problem. Didnt get that changed this time. The Dell support dude says the OS and the harddisk was the problem.
This was my heat sink. Check out the thermal padding on the new heat sink on the left.
My Western Digital (160 Gb) hard disk had a corrupt firmware issue. The issue was diagnosed as a 146 error while running the self diagnostic (function key + F11). They replaced that as well, with a new one on the right which had a new design.
This was the thermal pad they used over the processor. It helps in keeping the processor cool and dissipating the heat to the heat sink. Two of such pad were added. The same was there on the heat sink.
You can see the cooling pad/gel on the processor, the heat sink comes on top of this. Well those where the three things that they changed. After completing this, they found my CD-ROM was not working and the vista CD in extremely bad shape and language (Hindi).
So I am now stuck with a Dell XPS m1330 which does not over heat but has no OS. Thank god for USB bootable Ubuntu, I can at least access the internet without much fuss.
Shashank ND 