"Rob King" wrote in message
...

"John Edward Scott" wrote in message
...

"John Edward Scott" wrote in message
...
Hi all,

Like many others I bought a compaq presario laptop 700 series (729EA)
and
after a while I discovered it was prone to overheating (an
understatement
if
ever I heard one!). I trawled through the newsgroups and google
applying
various patches etc, looking on the compaq website and applied the
Softpaqs
it mentioned and the keyboard and mousepad updates that were
suggested.

SNIP

Just as a follow-up to myself ....it's currently a hot summers day here
(for
England anyway!) and my fan is running far less and quieter than it did
in
mid-winter. The PowerNow software has DEFINITELY made a difference.

5 days without a crash now...and counting..

Well I wish the service people would hurry up and return mine so I can try
this....... apparently work has been authorised to fix it.

And I bet the dude never once looked at this newsgroup :-)

Actually I have finally got the notebook back and they did in fact do
something to it. They seem to have looked up the same support sites as me
(or got the info direct from Compaq) and done the old
new-heat-compound-paste on the cpu trick.

We got it home and fired it up. Things seemed to run quite happily until I
tried to do something really menial. Bam! Total lock up again.

So, I thought, bugger this, before I take it back AGAIN, I will nuke the
whole HDD and completely reinstall the OS from scratch. So, on wnet WinXP
Pro + SP1. I downloaded the PowerNow software and it showed the everything
running at maximum. I scrounged the MS site for that PowerNow CPU driver
and installed that (5.1.2600.1106 is the latest verion apparently).
PowerNow now shows everything at minimum with occasional spikes up to the
max when under load. I'm assuming this is how PowerNow works?

Anyway, haven't had a lockup since the reinstall. I've also avoided
installing any of the Compaq software as WinXP drives it all anyway and I
don't much care for the easy access stuff.