I was having very odd behavior on my Dell Latitude D820 which has steadily gotten worse since December.  It started with DirectX applications.  I enjoy playing FSX from time to time and although my D820 is a bit underpowered in the GPU area it would play fine.  Starting around December though FSX would play ok for about 5-10 minutes and then start stuttering.  The CPU would then hang at 100% and all heck would break loose.  As my primary use of this laptop is not for games but for development I just put FSX aside and plugged on. 

Starting in January it got worse.  Video playback would stutter after a few minutes and my CPU would go to 100% utilization.  I started getting Video Driver crashes in Vista and I couldn't understand why.  I thought it may have something to do with drivers so I went to laptopvideo2go.com and downloaded the absolute latest Nvidia drivers.  The problems didn't go away so I reverted back to Dell's drivers.  I thought it might be my sound card drivers which were actually for the D830 as posted in an earlier blog, but downgrading them just made my systyem worse as the upgrade fixed several issues.

What was going on here?  I couldn't figure it out.  Finally it occurred to me that these problems only started happening when the system was doing something intense for an extended period of time.  I also noticed that the laptop was scorching hot when I took it off my docking station.  I started to think that it was overheating.  Using a great piece of software called i8kfanGUI I was able to monitor my system temps.  My CPU was idling at 74 degrees and my GPU was idling at 75 degrees celcius.  When running secondlife my GPU was getting up to 85c and my CPU 81c  Not know if this is hot or not I borrowed my bosses' D820 and put my harddrive in it.  Now i8kfanGUI was showing an idle temp of about 54 on the cpu and 56 on the GPU, much lower.  I found my culprit.

I have Dell Gold technical support so I told them what I found.  The tech said he had a D820 himself and used i8kfanGUI which I was glad to hear.  After discussing things for a while we agreed that we should have the heatsink and fan replaced on the unit.  When getting this cleared by his supervisor he mentioned i8kfanGUI and told me that "my supervisor says you should remove that software immediately as it will void your warranty."  WTF I thought, you just told me you were using it.  He said that "I can do with that info what I may" and I could tell that he thought it was ridiculous but just wanted to let me know what his super told him.  So I get in trouble for helping Dell diagnose the problem (heat problems can be very tough to figure out).

It looked like everything was on course to get resolved, but looks can be deceiving.  I am now located in the US Virgin Islands and even though we are part of the US, Dell doesn't see it that way.  I got transferred and given about 15 different phone numbers and spent 4 hours at this point trying to get someone who can help me.  Finally I was put on with Gold Technical support in Latin America.  The specialist, who was very good, was obviously not speaking English as his first language.  I guess I misunderstood him as I thought I was told that the technician would get back to me with in 24 hours to set up an appointment.  Its been over a week and I still haven't received that call.  When I followed up via email I was told I could expect a call when they have the part; a time that couldn't be determined.  To put it in perspective, Gold support in the US (mainland apparantly) means 24 hour response time. 

It had been over a week and I still hadn't received a call back so I took matters into my own hand.  I got a can of compressed air and went to town. I took off the keyboard and hit the HSF assembly from that direction and also hit it from within the fan ports.

Guess what, my system now idles at 54 degrees c on the CPU and GPU!  No more problems playing FSX, or with playing back videos.  Everything is working well.  I emailed Dell support and said "thanks but no thanks" as I won't need their tech anymore. 

If you are having wierd problems with your laptop, be it a Dell D820 or any model I'd check the temperatures to see if they are high.  I also would NOT recommend getting Dell Gold support if you aren't going to spend most of your time in the 50 US states.  I am 90 miles from Puerto Rico which is a huge US commonwealth and am treated like a second class citizen by Dell.  I have owned 5 different Dell laptops over the last 7 years, have sold 20 or so to clients as part of consulting packages, but will now have to re-think my allegiance.  Finally, .50 cents of compressed air can solve a problem that cost me tons of time and lost productivity...if you are having heat problems definitely use liberal amounts of compressed air to try to clear whatever it is that is blocking your machine's exhaust..