overheating Medion laptop
A customer has a very old Medion laptop. He has some important data, which he needs recovered, as windows refuses to boot.
After some investigation, I find that even running BARTPE from CD, it only runs for a few minutes before either slowing to a crawl, or stopping completely.
I take a look at the cooling fan… Its a removable type, but nothing obvious blocking the vents… But I notice its running an old Athlon processor (I think around 1.2GHz).
It eventually becomes obvious that there is a severe temperature problem. I remember the old Athlons had some temperature issues (they always ran hot).
I try to reseat the cooling system, but it makes no difference.
So I take the laptop to the office, copy all the data to about 4 DVDs, and hand it all back to the customer (who is now going to buy a new laptop).
When laptop overheats try blowing off fans and heatsink with compressed air, it might help to fix overheating.
In order to backup data you can use an external USB enclosure for notebook hard drives. You just remove the hard drive from the laptop and install it inside the enclosure. As it shown here:
http://www.laptoprepair101.com/laptop/2007/04/17/access-hard-drive-using-usb-enclosure/
After that connect this hard drive to any other working PC and access it through My Computer.
Yep, I tried blowing air, but given the age of the laptop, I think the fan motor was just getting old.
To backup the data, I have a special ATA to laptop-ATA adapter. I use it to connect the laptop HDD (as a slave) to my main desktop PC, then just copy folders.