Just a quick update - I disassembled the machine and sadly it was a smoker's machine before I became it's owner. The disgusting brown sludge was all over the optical drive connector, but not where it connects to the drive, rather, it was at the solder joints to the motherboard. The way it looked like was if something was burned, an IC that either burned out or something but it was just the brown sludge from the smoker. Interestingly, the sludge was shorting the entire motherboard somehow, as now that I cleaned the board with 70% alcohol and removed all the brown sludge, not only does it enter/exit the bios faster, but it's able to enter windows which it wouldn't before, floppy drive loads faster and the optical drive works perfectly. I just wanted to share this information in case someone else runs into a problem like the one I had. Open the machine, check the motherboard. If it used to belong to a smoker, chances are the board is full of the disgusting junk and it's shorting it out.

I advise use thermal adhesive and 1mm or 1.2mm thick copper sheet cut to size larger than the ATI radeon video IC and still can assemble the computer. These overheat and fail any better cooling will help. I had to do this mod to my A31 just in case.

Cheers,

A30 systems are cool running P3s, A31's were the hotter running P4M. Never had an overheating issue with the A30 series.

I reside at thinkpads forums as well. Lot of people reported both A30 and A31 failing due to overheating ATI chip set. I added copper plate on it.

A30/A31 boards is really rare now.

Cheers,

Hot as they run, the P4-Ms never fail (and they are not even as hot as the non -M P4s). However, the overall hotter temperature inside the chassis may increase the chances that the prone-to-failure ATI GPU will die in an A31 rather than A30.

Those systems use the same copper parts to cool the GPU and CPU so a hotter running CPU will cause the GPU to heat up also. Adding a copper shim isn't going to help getting rid of the heat.

pentiumspeed wrote on 2020-02-10, 00:37:

I advise use thermal adhesive and 1mm or 1.2mm thick copper sheet cut to size larger than the ATI radeon video IC and still can assemble the computer. These overheat and fail any better cooling will help. I had to do this mod to my A31 just in case.

Cheers,

I checked the fan and it's above the gpu but it's not in physical contact with it. To be able to do this I'd need to get rid of the original cooling solution that the machine has?

dr_st wrote on 2020-02-10, 20:33:

Hot as they run, the P4-Ms never fail (and they are not even as hot as the non -M P4s). However, the overall hotter temperature inside the chassis may increase the chances that the prone-to-failure ATI GPU will die in an A31 rather than A30.

I checked the temps, CPU is running at 54-59C idle - is that considered normal? I haven't re-pasted anything yet. Also, sensor might be reporting incorrect information, because the laptop has lukewarm air going out of the exhaust, and also the sensor is reporting battery temperature for a non existing battery.

Yes, the ATI GPU chip is not touching anything else. That's the reason for added copper plate of my making , just flat piece cut to size but larger than the ATI GPU and secured with thermal adhesive. The heatsink fan inlet is hangs over this so air flow also cools the copper plate.