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The continued tribulations of my Inspiron 8200
June 17, 2007 ( geek )
My poor Dell 8200 - it was a lemon from the start. I've manually replaced the motherboard fans - three times, the CD/DVD drive more times than that (and it still sucks), and had to muck with the video data cable for the monitor when it started giving out. I can only say, thank god for sites like Parts-People, where you can buy replacement parts for Dells, cheaper, and with less hassle, than you can at Dell. This Inspiron reminded me to never ever buy a laptop from Dell outside of their Latitude line. I've seen Lats run over by SUVs and survive, where my Inspiron fails doing day-to-day activities.
Anyhow. I was having all the symptoms of another fan breakdown - the CPU never going into overdrive, but the fans always trying to run. Unusually, they were running even when my CPU was not all that hot (45C), and - more mysterious - both were running at reasonable RPMs, so obviously they were functioning fine. Some googling about turned up this thread which has seemingly proven correct - the thermistor circuit has gone haywire, causing my computer to think it's constantly overheating (thus, running the fans constantly and not speeding up, even when it really needs to). So now I have yet another program running in my system tray (which offends my geek-minimalist sensibilities), but my computer's managing better and staying within a reasonable temperature range. Woot.
Posted by griffjon at June 17, 2007 12:10 PM
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