4 year old Dell Dimension 4600C with thermal event

ajhill

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Feb 24, 2009
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I've never experienced an unexpected thermal event shutdown before. The fans still appear to be working and there was a little dust within the fan and on the heat sink. Is that the likely cause? Or is there a thermostat?
 

ajhill

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Feb 24, 2009
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I've installed the program but I'm unsure about the settings. It makes it sound like it can control my machine which is a little disturbing if I can't adjust the controls. It reads 41C for HDO but both fans read zero if though they appear to be running. I'm not sure the speed feature is actually working. Blowing off and vacuuming the heat-pipe heat sink for the CPU appears to have definitely helped because it has stayed on for over an hour after the cleaning. It was shutting down after only 5 minutes this morning. I just wish that I had asked for your help earlier so that I could have monitored the temperature before I cleaned out the dust. However, thanks for the advice. Any suggestions about using the SpeedFan program would be appreciated.
 

joefriday

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Feb 24, 2006
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The Dell thermister fan cannot be read by speedfan. Doesn't matter what motherboard it's plugged into, it does not seem to report RPM info back to the board.
 

ajhill

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Feb 24, 2009
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Thank you. The temperature readings are interesting but at this point I'm not sure what normal should be for my CPU. Cleaning the dust from the fins of the heat-tube assembly seems to have stopped the thermal shutdowns at this point.