Okay - modification is done! I took a small, somewhat tin aluminum piece from another laptop, which I had to cut to make it fit inside, then I realized that it may not be enough since originally it only cooled smaller ICs, so I added thermal paste to the gpu, and then to the heatsink so that it's st...

Can I use the paste that I got with AMD FX 8120? Or is it too old by now?

Also, another question, What would be considered normal temperature for the processor? Right now it runs at 55C idle without being re-pasted. That's a bit high. You can probably bring it down 10 degrees by good re-pasting. Which OS are you running and how many processes are there on a fresh boot ? ...

Also, another question, What would be considered normal temperature for the processor? Right now it runs at 55C idle without being re-pasted.

Hah, I hope so! The display on mine isn't the best either, seems a bit yellowed but this machine used to be owned by a smoker, I didn't dare to scrub the lcd panel too much so it doesn't crack, but in the corners, the screen is considerably darker than in the middle or top. Yellowing in the corners...

No, has a few scratches, and someone has replaced both the floppy and optical drive judging by the missing screws. Well now, having in mind how muich those systems costed back then, it has most likely been used by bussiness segment. 4000hours is 500 working days. Two years of use and later on put o...

I mean considering it's been in use for 4000 hours. That's really not much use for a laptop. At all. Especially for a system that is about to be able to vote... Is it brand new looking on the outside ? No, has a few scratches, and someone has replaced both the floppy and optical drive judging by th...

I checked this laptop's original hard disk and it seems like it's been in use around 4000 hours, but the more I google the more I see that the machines that have this problem have a faster processor - mine only has a 933 mhz pentium 3 and it runs cool. I know this may sound very stupid but is there ...

Except it's not VRAM but the GPU itself that can fail due to too much heat, thats why I think this can be easily fixed with a cooling mod. Just wondering what would work better, copper or alu?

Yeah I was very careful with my PS3 that decided to cook it's own gpu, not gonna risk it. I'll modify this thing, but I'm wondering if I should DYI a custom copper heatsink or maybe buy one of those aluminum fanless heatsinks from ebay? This machine just seems to be *perfect* for windows 98 gaming.

Searched the forum, couldn't find any, If anyone has an ISO or can make one that would be great Sorry if I posted this in the wrong section.

I managed to fix a different laptop (Acer Aspire) which had a similar problem by unplugging every component then trying to turn on the machine and find out the culprit. On that laptop, it was the physical quick-launch keys causing some kind of a short and the machine would refuse to even power up.

I recently bought this model from the flea market, and luck have it, it's gpu is intact. I'd like to keep it that way since this model seems to be prone to cook it's own guts like the early xbox 360s from what I've read, so could anyone suggest a way to cool down the chip? Right now, it's *bare* by ...