root wrote:
I picked up and HP Pavillion which is just over
one year old. The guy who sold it said it just
needed an new hard disk. Not true. I put a
new drive in it and installed my OS. After an
hour or so the system couldn't read the disk.
I shut it down and what I think is the Southbridge
chip was very hot. It had a small passive heat
sink which I removed, cleaned the surfaces, and
put on fresh conductive paste. I also affixed
a small fan to the heat sink. After this I was
able to run the machine for three or four hours
before the same disk read failures started.

I replaced the power supply with one known
to be good and the problems came back after
three hours or so of operation.


Just now I removed the CPU heat sink/fan and
renewed the heat sink compound. The CPU was
at room temperature, so I don't think this
is the problem.

None of the other components on the motherboard
is even warm to the touch. Even the disk drive
was at room temperature.

I can't think of anything other than heat that
would explain the problem, but then I don't
see how the machine could run for several hours
and without overheating.

Any ideas?

I forgot to add, this is a model a6720y desktop
Pavillion. It has an AMD x4 @2.2GHz, 6Gb of
memory, and no IDE drives.