The first thing I did was to take out the hard drive and back everything up onto one of my external drives.
When I restarted, I left it on my bench and,sure enough, it kept turning off, sometimes almost immediately and sometimes after 10 or 20 minutes. When I turned it on in the morning, it lasted 30 to 40 minutes. So, I figured it was an overheating problem as it common with this series from HP. When I picked it up, I nearly dropped it - the base was far, far too hot to touch.
After it was cold, I uncovered the hard drive, turned it on its side and ran it outside in the cold. I loaded Speedfan and various other temperature related utilities and discovered that, while the CPU was running slightly above normal limits, the hard drive temperature rose steadily until it hit 70C - no wonder it was too hot to touch and no wonder it kept crashing!
Having scoured the internet, this is a common problem. New motherboards are expensive and they may or may not resolve the problem. When I looked on eBay, there were dozens up for 'spares or repair' with very similar symptoms.
Having had a similar experience with a Dell XPS M1330, where the GPU overheats, I took the dv2175 apart and, as I lifter off the top cover, I could tell immediately that the GPU was supposed to cool via the top cover via a small thermal pad. These are supposed to be sticky both sides but this had come completely unstuck so the GPU was simply pouring heat into the interior of the lap with no way to get rid of it. No wonder the hard drive was hot - it was less than an inch away.
Given the temperature of the GPU, I figured that a thermal pad wasn't going to resolve the problem. Not my strongest area but thermal pads seem to have a thermal conductivity of 4 - 10 w/mK whereas copper shims run and 400 w/mK - roughly 100 times as conductive. I bought some pure copper shims and cut one down to size and attached it with Arctic's MX-4 paste - supposedly one of the best available. I was concerned that, since this paste is not an adhesive, it might allow the copper shim to slide off so I put some self adhesive thermal pads around it to hold it in place. I then added some more MX-4 to the top surface and replaced the top cover, screwing it down as hard as I could.
When everything was back in place, I restarted everything, this time just sitting on my bench with the hard drive cover back on. I eagerly watched the temperature of the hard drive...
Well, ever since it has never exceeded 52C - a bit hot but tolerable and roughly 20C or even 30C below what it was.
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