G'day everyone,

A couple of days ago my notebook (FIC A440, branded 'Gericom') started
acting up: whenever I touched it in a certain way it crashed.
Suspecting a bad contact somewhere, I opened it up, cleaned it up a
bit & inspected; removed cooling-block with fan from CPU; apparently
it's an 'Intel Pentium !!! FC-PGA's socket 370', whatever that
means...

Anyway, there were 4 (numbered) screws with a coil-spring to fix the
cooling block to the IC-socket;

The question is: should the screws be simply 'tight' or should the
springs take up the function of pressing the block against the CPU?
Because this CPU can get quite hot, alu block starts expanding and
might pull the screw-sockets (copper inserts) out of the plastic
CPU-socket? Or are these springs there to prevent the screws from
loosening up themselves after several thermal cycles? If so, I assume
the screws should be tight; but if things heat up, is there no danger
that the inserts get pulled out of the plastic socket?

Anyway, for the moment I've screwed them tight & all works fine now; I
also tried them loosened up (so springs do the pushing) and whenever I
flexed the notebook, it crashed. BTW, these 4 screws are easily
accesable with only keyboard removal necessary (I found this out after
I almost completely disassembled it...)(there are 4 holes in a metal
cover plate, with numbers); this may be constructed because these 4
screws may need (regular?) tensioning? Access to them was excellent,
no screws needed to be loosened to gain access to the 4
CPU-coolant/socket screws.


BTW, the notebook is 2,2 years old (just out of warranty...) and I was
telling someone that very day how satisfied I was and that it was
trouble-less. That same evening it started crashing... Now I'm not a
superstitious guy, but this made me start wondering.....

If anyone has experience with this kind of stuff, I'd be interested.
It works now, but it's possible the CPU wasn't seated well in its
socket and the pushing from the screws helped to make contact; this
however might mean the screw-inserts may get overloaded and eventually
work loose.


I'm interested in hearing how exactly these 4 screws and springs
function.

Grtz,

Peter Dingemans.