Old Compaq laptop turning off during OS boot/heavy load

Slayer3032 · May 16, 2019

I have a Compaq CQ60-420US that I bought new back when they were on clearance at Staples for like $250. It's had an issue like the last 6-8 years where it will hard power off and then restart if I attempt to boot into an intensive OS like Windows or Linux Mint if it's plugged into the charger. As long as I let it charge and let it boot on battery I used it for some gameserver testing and dev, used to run a vanilla Minecraft server pretty well too. After breaking my computer's ability to boot to Windows, I needed something the other day simply to make a bootable flash drive and I had to wait until the battery was strong enough to get it booted into Mint. I've been messing with it off and on and after sticking Xubuntu LTS on it, it will finally boot on a charger!

It's definitely not fixed though, on battery or charger if I attempt to play 4K60 or 8K60 Youtube it will turn off as soon as the video buffers up and tries to play. So it's definitely not just the charger which I thought it was for most of my ownership of it. It's not overheating, while it idles at like 50c I was able to watch 1440p Youtube, "play QuakeJS" and have a twitch stream in the background for 90-100% cpu usage and it just made it upto 63-65c without any issues. The fan functions correctly and while I haven't let Memtest go at it for an extended period, it seems to pass. The battery that I use in it also still works, I have a second one which doesn't and acts exactly the same.

Having tossed out a slew of other laptops, including a few which were newer. This one is in amazing shape and while the screen isn't 1080p you can't see massive grid gaps between pixels and it is pleasant to use. The keyboard is pretty acceptable too and I don't constantly mistype like I do on most low profile keyboards. I'd happily throw $30 at it to improve it some but I don't want to take it apart multiple times since literally everything has to come apart to get to the cpu. Core 2 Duo T9400's are like $4.50 from China and I'm sure I can find another DDR2 SODIMM at a recycler. I'm just really confused on what could be causing it and I'm really concerned that if it's a power draw related issue which putting a larger cpu in it would make it near unusable forcing me to take it apart again.

Does anyone here have any experience with old shitty HP Laptops? I totally understand these things were built to be disposable and the components in laptops are trash tier, that's why I'm hesitant to even put $5 into it.

aisle9 · May 16, 2019

Why are you trying to stream 8K video from a 10-year-old laptop, exactly? It's sounds like it's just giving you the computer equivalent of this:

Slayer3032 · May 16, 2019

17 minutes ago, aisle9 said:

Why are you trying to stream 8K video from a 10-year-old laptop, exactly? It's sounds like it's just giving you the computer equivalent of this:

I'm not trying to stream 8K video on something with a 1366x768 screen, I'm trying to find ways to troubleshoot and recreate problems with reasonable repeatability. 8K video was just the first thing that came to my head for how to slam the cpu with max load on a fresh installation of Xubuntu.

I tried stress on it, it hard reset while doing an apt-get on stress but hilariously nothing I tried in stress would cause it to.

aisle9 · May 16, 2019

1 minute ago, Slayer3032 said:

I'm not trying to stream 8K video on something with a 1366x768 screen, I'm trying to find ways to troubleshoot and recreate problems with reasonable repeatability. 8K video was just the first thing that came to my head for how to slam the cpu with max load on a fresh installation of Xubuntu.

I tried stress on it, it hard reset while doing an apt-get on stress but hilariously nothing I tried in stress would cause it to.

See, that's why I think your computer is just asking you to kill it. IIRC, Ubuntu's stress command doesn't touch the GPU, or the iGPU in your case. Throwing 4K/8K video at the iGPU is probably enough to totally overwhelm it and crash the whole system, and that wouldn't come up in a regular stress command line test because that's not messing with graphics. I would imagine that explains what's going on, and your saying that it can handle 1440p YouTube without any problems backs that theory up.

Slayer3032 · May 16, 2019

16 hours ago, aisle9 said:

See, that's why I think your computer is just asking you to kill it. IIRC, Ubuntu's stress command doesn't touch the GPU, or the iGPU in your case. Throwing 4K/8K video at the iGPU is probably enough to totally overwhelm it and crash the whole system, and that wouldn't come up in a regular stress command line test because that's not messing with graphics. I would imagine that explains what's going on, and your saying that it can handle 1440p YouTube without any problems backs that theory up.

Disabling hardware acceleration and forcing the powersave governor to lock the cpu at 1.2ghz still causes it to restart. I tried another hard drive, it restarted while trying to install the OS. I ran memtest for an hour, nothing. When I was trying opening Firefox to disable the hardware acceleration, it also restarted.

It's a Intel GM45 chipset with 4mb of video memory being used with a Pentium T4200, I highly doubt it supports being used for anything. Using Hardinfo's benchmarks it seems to warm up the other sensors, temp 1 and temp 2 to 55c up from like 48c so the igpu definitely isn't overheating.