Cooling fan

[Luise]

Good afternoon,

Recently, I upgraded my operating system to XP SP II first time it worked
better than XP SP I, I think. Unfortunately, a few days ago the cooling fan
failed so the machine crashes about every 1 hour. (Notebook Compaq Presario)

I am wondering that is it a coincidence or a problem of XP SP II.

Please tell if anyone of you has such type of problem and a solution of this
problem.

Regards,

Luise

 

[Peter]

That wouldn't have anything to do with SP2. Your cooling fan must have been
on the way out anyway. Get it fixed asap or you might lose your entire
motherboard.

 

[Richard Urban]

Software CAN NOT cause hardware failures!

--
Regards:

Richard Urban

aka Crusty (-: Old B@stard

 

[V Green]

Software CAN NOT cause hardware failures!

Actually, although I haven't heard of it in a while,
it sort of could...

Remember the few older CRT's that would fail
when you tried to run them at too high a refresh rate?

I had one of those, an old ViewSonic, that died
when I mistakenly connected it to another PC that
had previously had another monitor that could sustain 85Hz
refresh...the ViewSonic was old enough that it didn't do DDC2,
the OS couldn't query it and didn't know that it
couldn't do that refresh...

Not really sure what happened internally, but never
got an image to appear on it again.

 

[Nathan McNulty]

Also, there are software programs that have the ability to
overclock/reaise the voltage of hardware. This can cause serious
hardware failures. One example of this would be ASUS's AI Booster for
their i865/i875 chipset boards. With this software you can specifically
set voltages in real time as well as change the frequency in real time.
I am pretty sure you could do some serious damage if you didn't know
what you were doing

 

[Peter R. Fletcher]

Sweeping statements are always untrue! (except this one <g>).

It is perfectly possible, at least in theory, for software to exploit
a hardware/firmware flaw in such a way as to damage the hardware.
Perfect hardware/firmware design would prevent this, but cannot be
assumed. A concrete example from the early days of PC computing
involved the old IBM Monochrome Graphics Adaptor, which could be
persuaded to destroy itself by malign (or erroneous) software. There
are other examples in this thread.

In the OP's case, however, I don't think the software is the problem,
unless a software-controlled fan is getting bad data about the
temperature, for some reason. His problem sounds like a random
hardware failure.

Software CAN NOT cause hardware failures!

Please respond to the Newsgroup, so that others may benefit from the exchange.
Peter R. Fletcher

 

[Nathan McNulty]

I agree it sounds like a simple hardware failure. There are actually a
couple of software programs such as FanSpeed which can control the fan
speed. This could also cause damage by turning off the fan for the CPU.
I have actually done this before, but no damage was sustained thanks
to my excellent heatsink