If it were my machine, I would remove the fan (heat sink) from the cpu, 
carefully clean off the cpu top and fan bottom, add a thin layer of 
thermal grease and replace the fan.

This is based on the possibility that the computer is still overheating, 
but taking longer to do it.  I don't give this a real high probability 
of helping, but it is easy to do and there is a reasonable probability 
that this will cure the problem.

Any time that a computer crashes at about the same time after starting 
(usually after booting to the operating system), no matter what program 
is running, I would suspect a heat problem.  Your problem is not quite 
so simple, as it could be caused by all sorts of things.  But, since 
cleaning the fan helped the first time, remounting the fan is indicated.

Dean Kukral

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Russ Cox" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, January 29, 2008 5:23 PM
Subject: [PCBUILD] NEC laptop hangs


I acquired a NEC Vestra laptop w/ a Pentium M CPU, 768 MB RAM.  It came 
with no hard drive so I took one from another dead machine.  I loaded 
Win XP on it and discovered while loading that it would shut down after 
awhile.  Found the CPU cooler fan was plugged up with dust and not 
turning. Cleaned out the fan and finished loading XP. Now it starts XP 
to the XP splash screen and hangs. I have scrubbed the HDD and reloaded 
XP Home a second time, same result. I have taken out the memory sticks 
one at a time, no improvement.  It will hang during startup in Safe mode 
also.
Any thoughts on what might make it operate?

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