root wrote:

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.

you got burned, what Can I say!

My son had a PC that went south when a high performance
video card was installed over the cheaper one that he
had in the PC. It worked and all how ever, the PC would
some times Reset, black out etc.. to the point where it
wouldn't reboot if you didn't let it rest. It turns out that
a support chip on the MB was running very hot with this card
in it.. Remove the card, and it was fine..
There were no options on the card to config for this problem.
Guess the buss speed the card was attempting to operate at was
killing the chip!

Oh well.