essenge

Hello,

I have a Dell E1505 that is about a year and a half old now. It has the Intel Centrino Duo T2300 @ 1.66Ghz, 1gb DDR Ram, 80gb Hitachi hard drive, DVD-RW, Intel WiFi and built in graphics, and the basic integrated Sigmatel Audio.

It has been having random restarts since about 6 months into me owning it. I have been on the phone with dell countless times, and they always have me run the integrated diagnostics when you restart and hit F12. If it makes it through without restarting, it always passed. It is a ~4 hour process that tests all the hardware like mobo, memory, hard drive etc. Finally when the warranty was close to expiring they let me send it in, and they replaced the motherboard. I got it back just after the warranty expired and it was still restarting whenever it wanted too. I called them back and they had me go through the same diagnostics etc but never found a resolution and they would not let me send it back into them.

I have reinstalled windows at least 4 times, updated every driver and software app from the Dell support website, and updated DirectX. I am pretty confident it is not a software problem. I have run antivirus's (McAfee and trendmicro online) and plenty of anti-spyware problems always coming back fine.

It will restart whenever it wants, sometimes DURING the Dell splash screen, or at the windows log in screen, whenever. Sometimes itll do up to ten times in a row at the splash screen or as soon as the windows login sound begins to play. It SEEMS to me that it does it more often when a sound event is playing. My friend had a problem on his PC that would only make it restart at sound events, he just had to upgrade his drivers but I have done that and it did not help. But, it is so random that I can not recreate the restarts. It also seems to do it when the hard drive temp is over 40 degrees Celsius. The Processors run anywhere from 30-60 degrees celsius, but it restarts anywhere in that range. The graphics card runs at about 40-50 degrees, the memory at around 50 degrees, and the hard drive from 30- 45 is the highest I've seen it. Like I said when I CAN track the restarts, the hard drive seems to be always above 40 (usually 42 or 43). I have tried removing all un necessary things like the DVD drive, WiFi card, even the keyboard and it still restarts. I have tried it with the laptop on the ac adaptor alone, the battery alone, and both hooked in and it still does it. It does when using WiFi or a solid wired connection, even on 56k. I have tried using one memory stick at a time, and also using memory from a friends Dell that is known to be fine and has the same problem.

I would just like to know what to replace to fix this. Did I get two defective MoBo's in a row? Is it the hard drive making the system restart? I do know when it restarts it does not save anything I've done such as Internet Explorer history or volume etc. I know with a PC it would sound like a PSU problem, but with this laptop I am stumped. Also if you were wondering when I look at the event log there are no errors and I do not get a blue screen from windows ever.

Thank you for any help or advice you can give me!

Cheers,

Darren