The CPU fan in my eldests pc has died,and now it now doesnt fully boot up. Obviously a new fan is needed, but what are the chances the CPU is also buggered now?

Cheers

I have a couple of spare fans if you need one (AMD I think).

I would have thought if you haven't run it for to long all will be ok? Dont computers "save themselves" if they get too hot? Some one will surly know!

Had the fan completely off (the bearings gone on it so it doesnt run smooth or at all well), and the processor has a distinct bunrt smell about it so I suspect thats the processor gone too. Bigger question now is ...is this likely to have damaged the motherboard too, or can I get away with a Puter fair and another Athlon 1 gig and fan?

Had a look on ebuyer.co.uk for a AMD socket A they start at

Don't forget if you are running XP and you change the mainboard and chip it may not like it and you may end up re-registering with the dreaded micro soft

Don't forget if you are running XP and you change the mainboard and chip it may not like it and you may end up re-registering with the dreaded micro soft

Make's one want to try linux...

got to admit it's the only thing stopping me from upgrading my computer at the moment.... just don't need the hassle

Cheers for the offers guys, but chip and fan are no probs, and as for the XP thing..again no problems on that front

I'm going to be a bit cheeky here.

Is there any obvious sign of damage on the chip? A little charring here or there?

If so please could I ask you to take a photo for me?

Before you all think I've gone mad, I'm in the middle of preparing a GCSE ICT course to be delivered over the internet to excluded and long term sick children. Under the hardware section we talk about damaged chips etc but without deliberately wrecking one I can't illustrate the damage. I do have a burnt out graphics card on my desk specifically for lessons as we're about to get a webcam facility in our lessons (fingers crossed on the bandwidth front!).

Don't worry if you can't help, us teachers just try not to miss an opportunity to gather resources!!!

Thanks,

Dont computers "save themselves" if they get too hot? Some one will surly know!

Mobile processors will reduse their speed in an effort to cut temperatures, and I'd guess that the non-mobile processors would do the same, but only a guess.

I know audio amplifiers will generally cut their output power if the main amplifier IC gets a tad warm... ... ...

general desktop pc cpu's will die extremely quickly without cooling. we're talking seconds rather than minutes/hours if i remember right. if there is any sign/smell of burning then it is pretty certain that it is fooked. old athlons like this one if found can be very cheap now though. probably not worth it though as you could get a much faster xp very cheap now too. whats all this cack about re-registering with micro$oft?? once registered you are registered. we have done plenty of re-installs without any problems what so ever

whats all this cack about re-registering with micro$oft?? once registered you are registered. we have done plenty of re-installs without any problems what so ever

Whn you do a reinstall of XP, you need to "reactivate" it. Microsoft will throw up an error of "this copy has been activated too many times". We've had this happen when we're only on a second or third reinstallation...

With regards the CPU - using passive cooling (ie. just the heatsink) a lot of processors can run for a short while, and most motherboards have the option to shut the machine down if the core temparature gets above a certain point.

Athlons run pretty hot though, so I'd expect the worst... :(

Rob.

pretty much all my experience of cpu's is amd but all my experience of dead ones is amd so thats what i was going on. maybe the copy of xp we have has been altered in some way then as we have absolutely no probs with it

There was a big review on heat-deaths in CPU's.

Interestingly, Intel P3 and P4 chips did reduce their operating speed when no fan was present to deal with the heat - temperature cut-out feature.

The Athlon chips didn't fair so well. They fried themselves within seconds of booting up.

If you had a safty temperature set-up on the motherboard for the CPU, you might have got away with it.

But, TBH, thee will be some damage to the chips internal circuits - thats the drawback of thin copper track wires - much higher resistance, so heat builds up much quicker.

The motherboard might be ok, diffcult to say. I had PSU that fried itself, the motherboard, CPU and HDD.............End of horror story...........

Might be as well seeing how it goes with a replacement Heatsink and Fan - then if not much better, you can always fit that to the new hardware.

worst we had was when a psu died. i took out the motherboard, cpu, ram, video, scsi card, scsi cd-rom and HD i think. a bad bad day

CPU should be ok. I remember that someone fried an egg in some tin foil on CPU's and they shut down when it got too hot with no damage. This was direct onto the CPU so no passive cooling.

Best way to find out is when you power it up after you've got a fan again, the cpu speed should read the same, or less if damaged. I damaged one once by overclocking and it lost 54MHz

maybe the copy of xp we have has been altered in some way then as we have absolutely no probs with it

Unless you've got something which circumvents the need for activation on a fresh install, you're as likely to get the problem as the rest of us!

Rob.

the problem with the reactivation lies in the fact a snapshot of the kernel is taken and stored in the OOBE activation. If you make than 2 major hardware changes (usually something hardcoded like memory controller and cpu) then it requires reactivation as it "could" be another PC. However after 90 days microsoft reset anyway so you can install your copy on any other PC

There is a rather interesting video over on Toms hardware which documents how different intel and amd cpu's cope with extreme heat situations ( this one ) 10 mb zip file

I had to reactivate a legitimate installation of XP Home recently when it decided out of the blue that too many hardware changes had been made since the initial installation. The puzzling thing was that I hadn't made any recent changes which might have triggered that requirement. Needless to say reactivation online wouldn't work so I had to speak to a nice lady in India to get the necessary zillion digit code to get XP working again before the 3 day deadline was up.

re-activation must be a "feature" on the Home Edition......

I;m using XP Pro, and i''ve had some serious hardware changes in my machine since i started using it - however, I suppose if you change the hard drive, it's not an issue........lol..........it's one option..........

re-activation must be a "feature" on the Home Edition......

I;m using XP Pro' date=' and i''ve had some serious hardware changes in my machine since i started using it - however, I suppose if you change the hard drive, it's not an issue........lol..........it's one option..........[/quote']

xpPro doesn't require activation online as it is is a corporate edition meant for large companies,altho anyone can buy it.The reason for this is so that they can buy 1 copy of xp and then obtain as many licences as they require from microsoft,1 per pc.

Windows XP Home greeted me this morning with a further reactivation request just 2 months after the last one. The only hardware change since then was a change of D drive from CD-RW to DVD rewriter 2 days ago. :(

Ok, I,m going the replace with the same chip and another fan due to it being that "time" of year etc....so anyone have an Athlon 1 gig and fan they want to sell me?

xpPro doesn't require activation online as it is is a corporate edition meant for large companies,altho anyone can buy it.The reason for this is so that they can buy 1 copy of xp and then obtain as many licences as they require from microsoft,1 per pc.

Two Words:

Site

Wide