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6 Posts
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857
April 14th, 2005 00:00
Inspiron 5000: Xircom Lan/Modem card locks up system
I've got an Inspiron 5000 that's worked beautifully for years, and it worked fine for all those years with my Xircom Realport Cardbus lan/modem card (the grey/orange dual pcmcia variety).
Recently I've noticed the system will freeze up completely, keyboard, mouse, can't do anything, until I eject the Xircom card. Poof, the systems comes back and everything is fine, except obviously no network/modem connection. But, the Xircom is very hot!! I mean really hot, even when I haven't really been using it.
I've suspected the fan is not coming on and it's letting the card, which is right near the fan, overheat and flake out. I updated the bios to A08, I cleaned out the machine, I tested with the diagnostic cd (everything worked fine) and even bought another similar Xircom card from Ebay. It does the same thing. Anyone else have news of Xircom's misbehaving?
Anyone have any ideas? I still suspect the card is overheating because I NEVER hear the fan come on, even though it ran as it should have during the tests. It does run a few seconds at boot up, but then it stops and I never hear it run at all. Fanon.exe doesn't do anything, neither does the other utility I tried, so I'm out of luck unless someone can help.
Thanks,
Chris
Recently I've noticed the system will freeze up completely, keyboard, mouse, can't do anything, until I eject the Xircom card. Poof, the systems comes back and everything is fine, except obviously no network/modem connection. But, the Xircom is very hot!! I mean really hot, even when I haven't really been using it.
I've suspected the fan is not coming on and it's letting the card, which is right near the fan, overheat and flake out. I updated the bios to A08, I cleaned out the machine, I tested with the diagnostic cd (everything worked fine) and even bought another similar Xircom card from Ebay. It does the same thing. Anyone else have news of Xircom's misbehaving?
Anyone have any ideas? I still suspect the card is overheating because I NEVER hear the fan come on, even though it ran as it should have during the tests. It does run a few seconds at boot up, but then it stops and I never hear it run at all. Fanon.exe doesn't do anything, neither does the other utility I tried, so I'm out of luck unless someone can help.
Thanks,
Chris
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Frazell
307 Posts
0
April 14th, 2005 14:00
If your Xircom card is overheating then it sounds like a problem with the card. PC Manufacturers are not required to build thermal cooling into PCMCIA slots simply because PCMCIA cards are not supposed to run hot (and if they do it's up to the device maker to provide adequate cooling). For instance, on my i5160 there is no cooling even near the PCMCIA slots so if i had a "hot" card then there would be nothing to aid it...
Not Dells fault as they didn't design the hardware (of the PCMCIA card). I recommend you try another PCMCIA card to see if you get the same problem, if you do it's the PCMCIA slot, else it's the card...