dv9005user

A couple days after I received my repaired DV9005 (still working fine, knock on wood) I was chatting with an Apple computer salesman in our local mall. He told me the nForce NF430 chip in my computer is called the "Southbridge" chip and it interfaces pretty much all the peripherals to the system bus (disk controllers, USB controllers, sound boards, WiFi circuits, etc). In Intel-based computers there is also a "Northbridge" chip that interfaces the Intel processor to the bus. In AMD systems the AMD processor has its own "Northbridge" logic built into the processor so it doesn't have a separate "Northbridge" chip. Why am I telling you this? I don't know. Just because its interesting, I suppose! However, it clearly seems to be the "Southbridge" chip (i.e. the NF430) that is overheating since that's the one with extra heat sink goop in my replaced mother board. I don't believe the temperature of the AMD processor is a problem. A couple weeks ago I was wandering through Radio Shack and found their infrared non-contact thermometer on sale for $20 (it used to be $50 and I resisted at that price) so I bought it. About a week ago I took off the cover on the bottom of my DV9005 where you add additional memory and also expose the NF430 chip. I let the machine hang over the edge of my desk about four inches so I could periodically sense the temperature of the exposed surface of this NF430 chip. It read 144 degrees after the machine had been on for an hour but not particularly stressed. I was expecting something closer to 200 degrees (or even more, if you can believe the reports of solder remelting as a problem). I haven't used any software that reads temperature sensors built into the machine. I can hardly believe the industry is building stuff so close to meltdown that these sensors are even necessary! Anyway, a malfunctioning NF430 chip, I guess, can bring the machine to a stop by locking up the bus or, at very least, disabling the I/O of any peripheral. However, as I read your post I felt that some of your problems have got to be software. I'm running XP, having purchased my machine just one week before Vista came out. When my machine was locking up not a single thread of execution would run, as evidenced by the frozen screen saver, or the lack of time advance on the system clock in the lower-right screen corner, or the total absence of hard drive activity light. The blue LEDs for playing CDs and DVDs still gave their little "chirp" but I have convinced myself that sound is emitted by hardware without a single instruction being executed anywhere. Somehow I feel the next laptop I buy will have to pass a "heat-touch" test by my fingers first! I refuse to buy one of those cool pads. That's acknowledging the poor design of these things. Hey, I just thought of a great idea, if you're "geekish". Boot up a LiveCD with Linux on it (I suggest MEPIS7.0) and see if your machine locks up or otherwise refuses to play sound smoothly. That'll get Vista out of the equation. That's what I did to convince myself my lockups (which still occured under Linux) were truly hardware related.

Best of luck.

Tim O