Running hot...

[alexpgp]

When my Sony VAIO simply froze for no reason while doing the translation that was due this morning, I was pretty upset. Even more so when the machine would not restart. Not only did I lose about 20 minutes of work or so, but if the machine did not come back to life, I would lose the results of three nights' really hard work.

It turns out the unit was almost too hot to touch. The fan was not working. I don't think it stopped because of the incident of a few days ago, I think it stopped because of all the glop in the air around here and in Houston.

As this post demonstrates, after the Sony cooled down, it started up. But it's getting hot again; I'll have to shut down again soon. The file will not stay open on my desktop, either because it really likes the Word 2000 on my laptop, or because it really hates the Word 97 on my desktop.

I have about three hours of work left, and that doesn't count any additional time for reviewing my work.

Gonna be (another) long night, except tonight, I'll be shutting my machine off from time to time... unless I can come up with a way to induce air flow through the thing.

On the positive side, I was allowed to hold the baby today. Amazing how many facial expressions a baby can make while it's sleeping. (And I wasn't even trying to sing!)

Cheers...

Comments

[velocity.livejournal.com]

Does the Sony have "feet" to elevate the bottom back? If not, you may want to order a CoolPad from Road Tools (http://www.roadtools.com/). I have one for my PowerBook Titanium G4. I swear by these things. Their website makes it look like they are just for PowerBooks or iBooks, but you can use it with any kind of laptop.

[alexpgp.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the tip... I'll look into it.

Cheers...

[bandicoot.livejournal.com]

My friend with the Vaio hasn't had any heat problems so far. Of course, his hasn't exploded, either ;)

How hard is it to take apart so you can check it over and clean it? I've never looked at his that closely, but I have taken my old laptop apart just out of curiosity.

[alexpgp.livejournal.com]

I don't know.

Normally, I just jump in with my set of tools and take computers apart, but I'm seriously mulling over sending this unit back to the factory and have them look at it. The part that holds me back is not wanting to send the hard drive along with it, because while file backup works fine for me with data files, I've had lousy luck backing up applications... invariably the one I need decides it wasn't "installed" correctly when I restored it.

Between Houston and here, this is the second computer whose fan has gone plotz in the last two weeks...

Cheers...

Re:

[bandicoot.livejournal.com]

That and not having it available for several weeks is why I mentioned taking it apart to look at it and see if there's anything you can easily do to fix things. Of course the down side is if you leave traces, you might affect your warrenty...