I see many posts similar to this but not quite the same.

I have an Inspiron 5000, 750 meg P3, 15” screen, 256K, 12gig. That is 4.5 years old.

It has worked perfectly for four years. I replaced the hard drive with a 60gig and upgraded to XP Pro.

The machine worked for a couple of months more and then started to get real hot where the hard drive and processor is. The hard drive eventually failed, I returned it under warranty, and I put the old on back in. I’m using it now.

Now the machine has all kinds of random reboots and freeze ups. The reboots always end up as a frozen screen, could be the bios screen or the desk top frozen. It takes many attempts to reboot before I can get it to hold. The heat sink is always hot!

Now I use the machine with the keyboard and plastic palm rest off. I use a docking station and external keyboard and mouse.

When it freezes I reset it and when it refreezes I push down on the video board or the heat sink, i.e. processor board and eventually it will hold.

I have flipped the memory modules, pulled out the drive, the processor, the floppy, the video board, the modem, the PCMCIA LAN card, everything. Put it all back and no difference. Oh yah the heat sink is clean but when I had the HD overheating problem the cooling fan didn’t seem to be coming on. Now it does.

 

Help, please help