computer crash, need help

[Remo-Shiva]

Hi All,

I have experienced a few crashes recently where during an operation,
downloading from newsgroups or rendering a 3d image my laptop crashes. One
minute its working fine then I hear a little hard drive noise then the
laptop switches itself off, and I have to power on about 20 times before the
computer verifies the ram and boots up. I've owned this laptop for over a
year and hove only recently been experiencing this problem, in the last 2
weeks or so, I am using the same software I always had, newsbin pro 4.1 for
downloading and autocad, 3d max and architectural desktop for rendering and
modelling. My laptop spec is pentium 4 2.6ghz, 1gb RAM, 64mb ati mobility
radeon 7500 integrated graphics card, running Windows XP Pro SP1 plus all
the usual.
Any help with this problem would be greatly appreciated, this is really
starting to piss me off, I can't tell what the problem is, my best
assumption is the programs use too much RAM then the laptop cuts out,
because of the problem it has when rebooting after this happens when it
can't verify the RAM but then why the hell would it do that? I have 1GB RAM
and I'm not doing anything different than normal. The first time this
happened I reformatted and reinstalled everything hoping that it would sort
it, but it didn't. I was hoping to download a program called RAM Rocket for
managing and defragging my RAM but maybe I don't need it, plus it isn't
free.

Thanks for any help I do receive on this problem, if you want to know more
please e-mail personally, but bear in mind that when it comes to the
workings of a pc I really don't know much so I may not give good answers.

kind regards
Mark

 

[Plato]

I have experienced a few crashes recently where during an operation,
downloading from newsgroups or rendering a 3d image my laptop crashes. One

All the fans in your laptop still working? They do go bad and then you
may get overheating problem which leads to shutdowns.

 

[Remo-Shiva]

Well, I took apart the back, took out the heatsink, vacumed out the 2 fans
and looked at the side of the heatsink and guess what I found?.......A
literal carpet of crap consisting mainly of fluff & hair. I have now put it
back together and can hardly hear my laptop, I was very pleased when I found
all that crap, which sounds strange but it means there wasn't a serious
problem. What I am going to do now is work my laptop harder than ever, I'm
going to download, play music and render a complex 3d object all at the same
time and I'm gonna see what happens, hopefully nothing bad will.

Thanks for all your input, newsgroups are great aren't they?
Mark

 

[Plato]

Thanks for all your input, newsgroups are great aren't they?

No kidding. It's the basic reason my site was created. Almost ten years
ago I had a PC question. At the time I searched dejanews [now
groups.google.com] for the answer and some 13 year old kid in
alt.computer had already addressed the problem and had the fix that
fixed me up.