hardware repair- mac book pro overheated (2008 model)

[hydrive]

Hi I have a friends mac book pro (15 inch, purchased in 2008) and it overheated due to the vents being clogged with dust. I took the motherboard and removed all dust, but it still does the same thing and powers right off.

What exactly happens is I hit the power button and the fans spin for about two seconds then they stop. As the fans stop I can also hear the hard drive losing power. Nothing shows on the screen because I believe it looses power before the screen can even load anything. I tried swapping out the ram and disconnecting the cd rom and trying to boot it up (i saw a post where the cd rom caused the laptop to not power up thats why i tried that).

I am pretty sure it overheated because the fan on the right hand side was 95% clogged with dust and the fan on the left side was about 75% clogged with dust. The dust was about 1/4 an inch thick (at the thickest point) between the grill and the fan.

A while back I fixed a broken laptop (it was a pc however) that overheated- the screen went blank so I removed the board and reworked the GPU with a hot air gun and it fixed the problem. So if I was going to try a reflow with this one I was wondering if anyone knows what chip I should try it on? Any info would be appreciated.

ps- laptop mother board is model 820-2249-A.

 

[GGJstudios]

What exactly happens is I hit the power button and the fans spin for about two seconds then they stop. As the fans stop I can also hear the hard drive losing power. Nothing shows on the screen because I believe it looses power before the screen can even load anything. I tried swapping out the ram and disconnecting the cd rom and trying to boot it up (i saw a post where the cd rom caused the laptop to not power up thats why i tried that).

I am pretty sure it overheated because the fan on the right hand side was 95% clogged with dust and the fan on the left side was about 75% clogged with dust. The dust was about 1/4 an inch thick (at the thickest point) between the grill and the fan.

It may or may not be an overheating problem. The reason I say that is it sounds like it's shutting down within seconds after booting up. It would take longer than that to build up enough heat to shut down. There may be something else contributing to the problem. Try resetting the SMC. I recently opened my MBP after 4 years of use, and there was barely enough dust inside to notice. If yours was that clogged, it sounds like you've been working in dust storms.

 

[Queen6]

My own Early 2008 15" MBP suffered fan failure and it too was pretty clogged up with dust, and it has gone through a couple of deserts literally. Towards the end with the right fan completely failed and the left struggling to maintain rpm`s I was seeing some pretty high temps well into the high 90`s C.

Once i replaced the fans, everything went back to normal, sounds like you have some other issue, difficult to say although these line of GPU`s are noted for having issue. Same as advised I would complete a SMC reset, remove the battery and reinstall and do a full cold start. You could also try with just one RAM stick at a time, as bad memory/mismatched can result in a grey screen, or at least it has for me in the past on this Mac

 

[Mal]

It's almost impossible for dust to clog up your machine enough to actually make it overheat, and it's definitely impossible for it to heat up quickly enough from a cold boot that it would shut down within ~30 seconds of pressing the power button. As GGJstudios suggested, try resetting the SMC, and also try getting hold of another known-good power supply. Chances are good that it's an internal component, but that will help you eliminate other possibilities.

jW

 

[hydrive]

I see dust getting into peoples laptops and causing an overheating issues quite often. Usually it is not as bad as this, but believe or not I have seen worse. Below are the photos just for kicks.


PS- I think its more then dust, but also carpet / blanket fibers. This happens when people put the laptop on the bed, the fans suck in particles and the particles are too large to exit the vent.

Below is the left vent


Below is the right vent


Will try to reset the SMC