The Money Mustache Community
Learning, Sharing, and Teaching => Ask a Mustachian => Topic started by: MMMdude on July 23, 2013, 08:27:25 PM
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I have a four year old compaq computer that has until a few days ago served me well. It went to sleep the other day and would not re-awaken. Two led lights were repeatedly blinking. Tried a hard reset a couple of times to no avail. Looked online and one trick was to blow a hair dryer into the fan slot. This worked. I had to do this the next two days as well. Solution is to disable the sleep function on the computer. Downside I guess is that electricity use will go up but i'm not having to buy a new laptop. Anyone know what might be the problem?
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Overheating? Have you opened it up and cleaned the dust out ever?
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Does the fan start on it's own? Old computer fans eventually stop spinning, but they are pretty cheap to replace. I don't know for sure, but some motherboards might detect whether the fan is spinning before powering up to ensure the chips don't fry.
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It's not entirely clear from your description what's going on. Are you using the hair dryer to blow cool air into the fan slot? Then it could be system overheating due to a dead fan, or just a lot of dust & crud inside.
There are a number of utilities that will show you fan speed(s), CPU and motherboard temps, and much more. (gkrellm and conky are two popular in the Linux world.) You could try running one of those to see if it's shutting down due to overheating.
Also, you should be able to look up the meaning of those two blinking LEDs. Generally particular lights blink to indicate particular problems.
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Also, you should be able to look up the meaning of those two blinking LEDs. Generally particular lights blink to indicate particular problems.
Any idea what this means?
(http://forgif.me/system/image/2529/image.gif)