W230ST How hot can it get before damage?

[trias10]

For a long time now, my W230ST has been turning itself on all by itself for no reason, although it happens rarely, maybe once out of every 1000 shutdowns. I have spent a lot of time trying to find the cause, and nothing fixes it, Wake on Lan is disabled, in fact all Wake settings are disabled in the OS and the BIOS, and any windows services or cronjobs which would wake the laptop have been disabled as well.

Anyway, a few days ago, the laptop turned itself on while in my backpack, which was closed (no airflow). I use TrueCrypt, so after it starts up it goes to the TrueCrypt boot password where for some reason it goes to 100% CPU usage. So my laptop was in the backpack for an hour straight, with no ventilation, running at 100% cpu and 100% fan. Eventually, the low battery BIOS beep started sounding which is how I finally found out about the problem.

When I opened that bag, it was like an oven, hard to describe how hot it was. The laptop itself was so hot to the touch, that the stickers in the lower left hand side of the keyboard all peeled off, and some parts you couldn't even touch with your bare hand. The LCD screen (which showed a black image, the truecrypt password prompt) had weird LCD effects in the centre corners, like the crystals were leaking or something. It was bad.

I turned the laptop off and let it sit untouched, in a cool area, with the screen open for 24 hours.

Things _seem_ okay now, the LCD discolouration is gone (although there seems to be a lot more light bleed now in the bottom right corner), and I'm still getting the same benchmarking scores as ever.

My question is, does this laptop (running with Prema v2 BIOS) not automatically shut down when a thermal trigger is reached? The laptop only started beeping from low battery, I would hope that it would automatically shut down at the BIOS level before it got so hot that it damaged anything?

How hot can these laptops get before permanent damage occurs? Should I be worried?

[Guest]

The beep may also have been the overheat protection which first beeps and then turns the laptop of on its own. If it was indeed the battery alarm then it didn't reach the Plan Of Record temps. POR is generally 100c.

As long as the laptop EC is in control of the FANs it will be protected from too high temps by the mechanism.

Also keep in mind that it won't run full speed on battery and further throttle once temps get higher. But as you said the body took a lot of the heat that couldn't escape...

[trias10]

Hi Prema, many thanks for the reply! Sounds like the internal components are okay, as my benchmarks are still the same as ever.

One question, in your opinion, do you think this incident may have damaged the LCD screen? As I said, it _seems_ to me that there is more light bleed now in the bottom right corner, but to be fair, I never really measured it from before the incident, and maybe I'm just more nervously noticing these things now. I don't know much about LCD screens, but I seem to recall light bleed is caused more by bad binding between the crystals and light source in the screen itself? So maybe heat like I experienced wouldn't affect it?

[Guest]

If the heat would altered the screen on any way, then it would be unlikely to happen in the bottom right corner as the heatsink, which is to be expected hottest place, is on the other end.

Strong Light bleed is fairly normal for the FHP screen model used in these systems. Mine has it too.

[lonesyndal]

I would highly advise to not let the laptop enter "Sleep Mode". That or disable options that allow keyboard, mouse, and plugging/unplugging to turn the system on.

I strictly use Hibernation only to avoid the machine from powering on (as I had a similar issue, except it didnt hit past 92C by the time I got back to it).

[Quaddragone]

The intel cpu has built in throttle / shut down feature if its too hot...90C+ is defo on the hot side and I would suggest getting a laptop stand to cool the laptop down