I have been running speedfan, which seems to work very well. It tells me the core temperatures, the hard drive temperatures, and the video GPU temperatures.
This PC has a nVidia GeForce 8400GS. I had no idea that video cards got so hot (over 65 C when viewing HD video).
I ran the loooooong (3 hour) Dell Diags on this machine and it passed with flying colors.
I am starting to think that this machine either has weird motherboard fault/bug or a bad power supply.
Some others on the Internet have reported that a very similar problem on their Dell Dimension 530S was VERY difficult for Dell to diagnose, and was fixed by replacing motherboard, fans, and/or power supply. Dell swapped the motherboard and fans on one guy’s PC and the problem remained, but a new PSU fixed it.
To recap the symptom:
The PC, when not under much load at all, will just turn all it’s cooling fans onto high, and hard-lockup, with the blue power light slowly blinking. PC can only be restarted by powering down.
One odd thing is that the blue light sometimes continues to blink after restart, and a second restart lets the power light go solid (some bit flipped?).
It’s not going into suspend mode, as that’s disabled. The blue light on the power button is blinking, like it would in standby mode. There is nothing at all in the event logs or nothing special going on at the time (e.g. no virus scan, update, etc)
As a sanity check, I will load a live Linux distro on it, and run it that way for a couple of days. While I am guessing that this is a hardware issue, I could be wrong, and it’s some weird ACPI driver issue of some sort. I updated the BIOS and all the various drivers from Dell.
thanks all for replies, I will start a new thread if/when I figure this out.
