A Toshiba Satellite Pro came into the shop today. It was completely dead. I took it to bits as I thought it would be a cooked motherboard. The motherboard had no signs of overheating and all the components looked in good condition. I then turned the board over to look at the processor and found this:
This is a heat sink. Its purpose is to conduct the heat away from the processor. The orange copper bit was bent and distorted and had been glued to the actual heat sink. Glue is not a very good conductor of heat and has caused the processor to over heat. The damage to this heat sink was probably caused by the computer over heating before and this is the result of that repair. I am now going to hunt through my computer scrap yard to find a second hand one as this cannot be repaired. The computer now fires up but I cannot leave it on long to test as it does not have a heat sink protecting the processor.
Update to follow.
A replacement part has been found and fitted. The replacement part is on the left. You can see that the fins are straight and the copper tube is the correct shape. This tube has to be flat as it needs to fit flush to the silver heat sink. Heat will now be carried efficiently away from the central processor.
