System pause/stutter every second, even in BIOS menu

[rhobbis]

Hi,

My Dell Inspiron 1720 (2GHz Core2 Duo, with 2Gb RAM, GeForce 8600M GT) has an irritating system pause EVERY second.

I have read about lots of 'causes' for this including the WLAN card, nVidia drivers, etc

In Windows it shows itself as a brief (maybe a 10th of a second) pause in the mouse movement, and if playing audio it sounds like feedback or a "BRRRRRB".

The weird thing is, it happens in Safe Mode, and after booting from a Windows System Recovery DVD, and after booting from Windows 7 install DVD.

I thought it might be a failing HDD (Dell Diagnostics reported HDD failiure imminent) so I removed the drive and booted from the DVD into Windows 7 install - same problem - a mouse movement pause every second.

So next, I removed EVERYTHING I could - HDD, extra RAM, WLAN card, battery, and then booted into BIOS.

It's a lot harder to notice because of the text-based display but when scrolling up and down the options list on the left I can still detect a pause in the cursor movement.

Booting up into Windows 7 Install from the DVD, with EVERYTHING removed as above, it still has the same problem.

Does anyone have any idea what could be causing this?

 

[dingo07]

im assuming it's out of warranty... sounds like the processor

 

[rhobbis]

Yeah out of warranty unfortunately.

 

[weaselman]

I think you may find the suspect to be the on board Gpu/ the Nvidia 8600GT graphics chip a few years ago in laptops had a big problem, one of them was the heat it gave off and bad cooling solutions on laptops, a lot of laptops ended up broken due to this. The likely cause is lots of dirt in the fan and the cooling fins of the heat sink of the laptop. The Gpu is obviously overheating and throttleing back to try to keep cool, time to open that laptop and clean all the dirt and fluff from the fan and cooling fins of the heat sink.