Windows XP forum: Overheating above 50 degrees C

Not only must a system modder (you) add parts but may have to re-evaluate cooling needs. Add a fan, drill a hole, remove plates to let air flow increase.

Bob

You could back up to a USB memory stick. With regard to temperature, this varies according to the make of processor. If you have an Intel, 50 is probably fine.
I have an AMD Athlon XP which runs at 51, which is high but according to the manufacturer's site admissable. You could try a program called 'Speedfan' but it would depend on whether you have appropriate sensors installed, so it might not work. If you know what make of processor you have go to the manufacturer's site, and check. If you don't know, download Belarc Advisor which will show the make on analysis. The other thing is to do what Bob says, take the cover off and with the computer turned off clean out all the dust and fluff which clogs up the fans. You shiould do that anyway, on a regular basis.

The raw read error rate is almost certainly a S.M.A.R.T. report on your drive. I don't know what the acceptable limit is for that drive (it varies), but the fact you are getting a pop-up warning implies it must be over the limit. This indicates the disk surface is getting poor, so you should replace it soon. BTW, was it the 10 GB drive (I assume the system) or the 200 GB drive (I assume your data). It is good to see you have the two drives and are using them properly.

Was there any indication of what temperature was being measured? Some manufacturer's version of S.M.A.R.T. do report the drive temperature if a sensor is provided, and that would be in a S.M.A.R.T. report. A temperature of 50 C is 122 F, about the temperature of my hot water -- not very harmful, but just unpleasant. If the drives are just quite warm, they are not this hot. Otherwise, there is not likely a connection between the two messages.

It is more likely that, as has been assumed here, the temperature is the CPU or a mobo temperature. The previous suggestion are good ones in this case.

No, your use of broadband, your downloads, etc. are not the cause of the problems.

Now that your drive may be failing, you need to get your data off of it into a safe location. I doubt that you can back it all up to a USB stick of only a Gig or so. You need to back up to CD/DVDs, to an external drive, or best, transfer all files on that drive to a new one that you will use to replace the failing one.

As for backup software. If you buy a new drive there should be a disk with it and likely a data transfer program on it. If you go the backup route, I would suggest Acronis Drive Image or Norton Ghost, especially if it is your system disk going bad.

Hope this helps

Frank

First of all, a dumb question. What is a S.M.A.R.T. report?

You are correct about my use of the drives (although someone told me to swap them so the 200GB is the master). I realized just this second that my original drive is 20GB, not 10. It is the system drive, although it does have SOME data on it - it's only got about 8 or 9 GB's left, so I bought the bigger one. The one I bought is a Seagate, and the one that came with the machine I believe is a Western Digital.

How do I tell which drive is overheating? I've only had the 200GB for about 2 months, but of course you can buy a lemon with ANYTHING.

Yes, I prefer backing up to CD. I bought an external CD/DVD drive which I haven't installed yet. (My life lately is pure h---!) I do have a CD ROM drive in the PC. Also, would I be able to transfer the OS if it is the system disk failing? The main thing I'm concerned about losing is the hundreds of music files I have, and a few text documents. Just in case this is important, I did not get a recovery disk with this PC (it was a refurbished unit). Is it possible to MAKE one? As I recall, I made emergency boot disks, but not a recovery disk.

There was no indication in either message about what was being measured. What do you mean about the data transfer program being on a new drive? I certainly didn't get one (that I know of - is that internal, inside the drive?) when I bought the 200GB. I can't recall (or find) any disks that could have come with the drive. (My memory is older than I am though, so anything is possible!)

BTW, thanks for doing the conversion from C to F ! It's been a loooong time since college!! <g>

It sounds like the Hard drive. I have six fans including the two in the Power supply. New Drives are cheap. Get one on SALE. Remember that an OEM drive does not include the cables. If you have standard IDE drives 100 or 133 MHZ you can use the old cables. However, I have a new board and CPU and I use SATA only.

in your reply. To deal with temperature, it is very unlikely that your hard drives will overheat unless your in a rain forest. The issue to be concerned about is the processor, which will lead to an expensive replacement, maybe including the motherboard if it fails. The processor is the approx 80mm square raised unit with a fan in the centre or off centre of the motherboard. That has a small fan on a heat sink that should be kept running and clean. Its speed varies with usage. in my case it settles at about 4100. This fan keeps the processor cool.
Hard disks can fail at any time, so unless you have everything backed up, including the windows installation, and you do not have a windows cd disk, yes you will have to purchase another copy of windows.

If one HD is failing, just put the important files on the other HD and make a more permanent backup onto an optical disc (CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-RW, etc.). If you can't burn CDs or DVDs, backup to whatever external storage you can.

Paul Roantree suggested SpeedFan. Have you downloaded and installed it? SpeedFan will look for all temperature sensors and fans and report all relevant data such as system temp, CPU temp, HD temp, video card temp, cpu fan sped (rpm), case fan speed (rpm), etc. If you tell us the temps and fan rpm's, we can get an idea of what might be out of whack or need replacing. For example, maybe one of your fans is failing and we can't tell until we see the fan rpm data.

You can download free HD transfer tools from the major HD mfgs. (Western Digital, Maxtor, Seagate, etc.). They transfer the exact contents of one drive to another. CAUTION: the destination drive will be overwritten, so you will lose all files that exist on that destination drive before the transfer. You mentioned that the 200GB drive is a Barracuda. That is a Seagate model line, so you can use Seagate's ''DiscWizard for Windows.''

DiscWizard for Windows instructions (follow the instructions for installing ''As the Boot drive keeping the old drive in the system''):
http://www.seagate.com/support/kb/disc/howto/use_dw2002.html

Download DiscWizard for Windows (not ''DiscWizard Starter Edition'') here:
http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/drivers/discwiz.html

NEW WINDOWS?
If you can't find the original Windows Product Key (usually a sticker on the outside of the computer box, or in your original computer papers), you will have to purchase another copy of Windows. If you have product key, you can ask the computer mfg for a replacement disk--not a guarantee, but many have been successful in doing so. FYI, the Product Key is a 25 character code in the form of XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX.

I just had a burst of energy (12 oz. coffee). Will be coming down in about 2 hours. Yee-haw!

you saying that you had lost the product key; but if you did, there are ways to recover it. If your XP was registered and activated through Microsoft, you can call them; if you can answer some questions to show it is a legal copy, you can get a new key for a few bucks. Or, you can download and run Belarc Advisor (free) to display the XP key and some others. Another program for this is The Magical Jelly Bean Key Finder -- but I use Belarc, which gives a lot of other valuable information about your system. You should not need to buy a new copy of XP if your current version is legal.

As for creating a recovery CD; yes, you can. One set of instructions is at this link.

An alternative to a recovery disk is to create an image of your system drive using Acronis True Image or Symantec's Norton Ghost. You can then regenerate it, as of the image creation date, whenever you need.

Some manufacturers now put a recovery ''disk'' in a hidden partition on the system drive; you might check on this also.

Earlier you asked about S.M.A.R.T. disks (or just SMART, but this is used for so many other things that some prefer the acronym with periods). S.M.A.R.T. is the abbreviation for ''Self Monitoring And Reporting Technology''. It is a standard interface protocol and set of the drive features that allows a drive to check its own status and report it to a host system. S.M.A.R.T. information consists of ''attributes'', each one describing some particular aspect of drive condition. The message you got was for Attibute 1; to see some of the others, check this link.

And BTW, whoever told you that the big drive should be your system drive is (in my opinion) just plain nuts. Your system drive should have as little beyond the system and programs as possible -- therefore, it should be the smaller drive. This vastly simplifies system image backups and recovery.

(I doubt that your ''loooong time'' can match mine -- but then I've used many such conversions routinely for sixty-some years, so they are burned into my mind.)

Hope this helps

Frank

I've installed and run SpeedFan, and here are the results:
(I don't know what info you need, so it's ALL here)
Win9x:NO 64Bit:NO GiveIO:YES SpeedFan:YES
I/O properly initialized
Linked ISA BUS at $0290
Linked Intel 82801DB ICH4 SMBUS at $1880
Scanning ISA BUS at $0290...
SuperIO Chip=LPC47m192 (PLEASE REPORT)
Sensor's Base Address : $0600
Scanning Intel SMBus at $1880...
SMSC H/M Block (ID=$20) found on SMBus at $2D
SMART Enabled for drive 0
Found WDC WD400EB-11CPF0 (40.0GB)
SMART Enabled for drive 1
Found ST3200822A (200.0GB)
End of detection
Win9x:NO 64Bit:NO GiveIO:YES SpeedFan:YES
I/O properly initialized
Linked ISA BUS at $0290
Linked Intel 82801DB ICH4 SMBUS at $1880
Scanning ISA BUS at $0290...
SuperIO Chip=LPC47m192 (PLEASE REPORT)
Sensor's Base Address : $0600
Scanning Intel SMBus at $1880...
SMSC H/M Block (ID=$20) found on SMBus at $2D
SMART Enabled for drive 0
Found WDC WD400EB-11CPF0 (40.0GB)
SMART Enabled for drive 1
Found ST3200822A (200.0GB)
End of detection
Win9x:NO 64Bit:NO GiveIO:YES SpeedFan:YES
I/O properly initialized
Linked ISA BUS at $0290
Linked Intel 82801DB ICH4 SMBUS at $1880
Scanning ISA BUS at $0290...
SuperIO Chip=LPC47m192 (PLEASE REPORT)
Sensor's Base Address : $0600
Scanning Intel SMBus at $1880...
SMSC H/M Block (ID=$20) found on SMBus at $2D
SMART Enabled for drive 0
Found WDC WD400EB-11CPF0 (40.0GB)
SMART Enabled for drive 1
Found ST3200822A (200.0GB)
End of detection

That's all it would let me cut and paste. There's a "configure" box with all kinds of numbers. It gives the chip, sensor, sample, etc.

Temps:
Ambient 46 C --listed under "sample" for all these #'s
Remote 1 42 C w/green checkmark (I notice this number changes regularly between 41 and 43. #'s alternate w/ red up arrow and green checkmark, and don't seem to correspond to the #'s.)
Remote 2 -128 C w/blue down arrow
HD1 40 C w/green checkmark, alternating with blue down arrow

Fans: Fan 2 under "sample" it says 0 RPM, but I can see the fan running
Same for Fan 1

Automatic fan speed is unchecked (checking it changed nothing), and all other tabs are empty - no SMART report or anything else. I don't see any specificity on which temps it is monitoring, i.e. I don't see anything that says CPU temp, viceo card temp, case fan rpm.

As far as the Windows Product Key, I don't see anything on the outside except serial #, WOID #, HW BOM, and System #, nothing in the form you describe. This was a refurbished unit, and I don't have any paperwork with it. As far as having a legal copy of XP, all I know is that Windows has "validated" it (like when you want to download a specific tool, it will run its' validation tool on your system first).

I don't think I've given you very much information. I did move a copy of my important files and documents so that both drives have a copy, in case one fails.

Ali

Addressing overheating problems in general.

I have a Sony Vaio GRS700P. 2.2 GHz, P4M. I do a lot of DVD file compression which many time has my CPU at 100% for long periods. Recently my system was just shutting down in the middle of such activities, then even in a full system virus or Spybot scan.

I opened my system and found a copper heat exchanger screw directly on top of my CPU then leading to a radiator one side by the fan the other leading to a vent. The radiator at the fan side and the fan were covered with accumulated dust. I cleaned all that out with Q-tips and alcohol put it back together.

Running great now. Even CPU at 100% and no external cooling the system runs at below 50C. Point here, check your internals for dust / dirt. The cooling system pulls in ambient air and everything with it. Over time it will be compromised. Also at download.com get the free utility Speedfan. Real-time Temp monitor.

Water cooling tubes and fans for a PC? I've never heard of such a thing. Your profile says you are a novice, and I'm not much above that, but I do think you're pulling my leg!

ITs me again the infamous 15 year old. i forgot something again. You said that your media player would burn sometimes, well the fact is that the machine came with a 48x burner for Cd-r and 24x burner for Cd-RW and i dont know why it would only burn some of the time. Also if your Cpu was actually getting to the point where it would damage itself there is a sensor that will shutdown your computer without warning so you dont have to worry about damaging the Cpu. Also Cpu's can take a much higher temp than what Intel says, about 67 celcius.
As for speed fan not giving the stuff needed i have it on my cmoputer to and for some reason it will show me temps but wont change fan speed and let me do anything else so i thnk that it is just a problem with sensor on the motherboard.
ill keep checking back to see if my suggestion is replied to and if it helps but i got school and boat load of advance algebra homework so i might be kinda swamped but still out the pity i feel for you because i had to endure it as well ill keep on checking back