late 06 macbook freezing, random restarts, kernel panics, running hot

[furcalchick]

my late 2006 macbook running 10.4.11 has been acting very strange since yesterday. first, it freezes while i'm recording something off of isight and i have to restart. works fine for 30 minutes until it randomly restarts (probably due to heat) and takes me two reboots and some time to fix it (i have to put an ice pack to keep it cool). then later in the night, it randomly restarts again and takes two reboots to get it back. then in the past hour, the screen has frozen, it went into a kernel panic and it randomly restarted again while i was trying to post this the first time. and also, it's been running very hot despite having no applications running. any solutions to my problem? will upgrading to snow leopard help? thanks.

 

[TheShinyMac]

It's either your computer is overheating or your HDD is failing. Just back up now. Download smc fancontrol to see if your fan 's" work. Also download the smart reporter, it tells you the status of your drive

 

[furcalchick]

It's either your computer is overheating or your HDD is failing. Just back up now. Download smc fancontrol to see if your fan 's" work. Also download the smart reporter, it tells you the status of your drive

i just backed up early this morning (was way overdue on my monthly backup), so i probably won't back up again, and move a few changed files over to a flash drive.

i didn't download smartreporter because it requires 10.5, but onyx told me my hard drive was working fine (i repaired the disk a little over a month ago). but according to smc fancontrol, the fan is working fine.

btw, my computer has a tendency to overheat alot, but since i upgraded to .11 a bit back, it kinda stopped. nothing bad happens when i have an ice pack on the computer's base though, so i'm going to stick to that until i find out what's wrong.

i also heard some clicks in the hard drive not too long ago. at least i have an external to buck on.

another question: can dust effect overheating? if so, i may have to vacuum the insides of the computer to stop it from overheating.

 

[furcalchick]

ugh, had another random restart this morning after just waking it from sleep and moving it. plus, it had frozen pixels when i restarted the first time (they went away after that). and also, i took a picture from my istat last night, and i found something disturbing: the cpu stats sometimes drops to 0%. take a gander. and will upgrading to snow leopard remedy this problem? thanks.

update: booted from my external and i don't hear the clicking from the computer that i heard last night. i think this is at least in part a hard drive problem, but i'm not completely convinced that the cpu is all right, and the computer is still running hot.

 

[furcalchick]

i just wanted to update on the situation, after a trip to the apple store, they in fact confirmed it was a hard drive problem. i went online and got myself a new 320 gb drive along with a snow leopard box pack, and it should get here this weekend.

 

[toolbox]

Those units from the 2006 era had problems with the heat sinks expanding and shorting something on the motherboard causing the reboots.

Mine sure did.

 

[Dan73]

What about the overheating?

While putting an icepack to cool it down is a good temporary solution but after a while that must get annoying.

Also yes dust can clog things up and cause overheating, I suggest you don't vacuum (It can cause static = bad if it zaps the computer) get one of those dust cans that blow air out clean it out with that.

 

[furcalchick]

Those units from the 2006 era had problems with the heat sinks expanding and shorting something on the motherboard causing the reboots.

Mine sure did.

i was thinking that was from the core duo macbooks, not the core2duo ones (like mine). i haven't had a random restart since i reset the smc, and while a bit hot, it's still within normal parameters. i'm also going to install snow leopard in the new hard drive, and i will post an update in the next few days, i think that could help cool things down with a fresh install.