-: Instructor] In this lesson,
we are going to talk about cooling issues.
Now, a lot of times when your system starts locking up,
becoming unresponsive, has intermittent shutdowns,
continuous rebooting, or having application crashes,
blue screens of death, spinning pinwheels and kernel panics,
this can be caused by many different things
such as software issues,
disk and file corruption problems, malware,
or it could be a cooling issue.
This is because as your system is operating,
all those components are generating heat,
and this builds up a thermal load that has to be dissipated.
If your passive, active, or liquid cooling
is not doing its job sufficiently,
the system will overheat,
and this can lead to lots of different issues
that you're going to see.
Now, in order to determine if it's a thermal problem
or some other problem, you need to look at
how much thermal load is being created by your system,
and how much of that heat is being dissipated.
Now to determine this
you can use a couple of different methods.
One of the easiest is to simply touch the side
of your case and see how hot is your computer.
If you touch your laptop or desktop
and you feel that it's really, really hot to your touch,
that means you probably are having a thermal load issue.
Another giveaway that it could be an overheating issue is
that if that system is running fine for a couple of minutes,
and then it turns itself off or reboots,
this could be because it's getting too hot
and the system is shutting itself down
to be able to start trying to protect itself
from overheating and burning up its components.
Now, another indication
that your system might be overheating is
if you start hearing that your fans
are constantly working at very high speeds.
The reason this is a good indication of overheating is
because your system has thermal temperature
sensors inside of it,
and when those temperature sensors are detecting
a high temperature, they're going to turn on your fans
and spin them up even faster to try to remove that heat.
So if you see those fans are running for a really long time
at really high speeds, this could be an indication
that your system is not being able
to adequately cool itself down.
Remember, when it comes to cooling,
you need to make sure that all of your cooling components
are working optimally.
This means that if you're using active cooling,
you have proper power going to each of your fans,
as well as making sure those fans
are not clogged up with dirt or dust,
because that can hinder the cooling ability
of those fans as well.
Another symptom of your fans being clogged or dirty
or not operating properly is if you start hearing
a grinding noise.
Sometimes you'll hear this grinding noise
because the ball bearings inside of your fans
are starting to fail.
In these cases, you may want to oil those ball bearings
or you could just replace the fan completely,
because fans tend to be a very inexpensive component,
and it can be a lot easier just to replace the fan
and fend off future issues,
because those ball bearings are already deteriorated
and causing that grinding noise to begin with.
If you're using liquid cooling,
make sure you have enough coolant inside the system,
because low coolant levels could cause issues
with the system overheating.
So what do you do if your system is overheating?
Well, the first thing you should do is shut down the system.
By shutting down the system and giving it a few
minutes to cool down, this will help dissipate the heat,
especially, if your cooling system is not working optimally.
Then, you want to turn the system back on
and boot into the UEFI or BIOS.
This will allow you to go in and use the different utilities
in your motherboard to determine
what the current temperature is inside of that system.
This will also be able to tell you
how fast your fans are spinning and things like that.
By observing these things outside of the operating system
and within the UEFI or the BIOS,
you'll be able to determine if this actually is
a hardware issue with your cooling system,
or if there is some application running inside
of the operating system that is causing
these high temperature loads.
For example, in my company, we do a lot of video editing
and video editing is very process or intensive.
So we actually have a big issue
with these systems heating up over time,
especially, if we're using those programs
and doing large files.
So if I boot into the UEFI or the BIOS
and I look at the temperature sensors and the fans,
everything will appear normal,
because I'm not loading up those video application programs.
But if I have overheating
once I get into the operating system,
that's indicative of some kind of an application issue.
And in my case, that would be these large video
editing programs that we're running.
So keep these things in mind
as you're troubleshooting cooling issues.
Now while you're in the UEFI or BIOS,
you can also look at the different areas
or temperature sensors inside of your system,
such as the CPU's temperature sensor
or the different parts around your case
if you have multiple sensors installed.
This will give you a really good idea
of where your cooling issues are.
If you're having an issue with the processor or CPU
that's overheating because of a high temperature sensor,
you'll be able to look at the CPU's fan
and see if that's causing the issue.
And if it's not, then it may be the heat sink itself.
Remember, when you install the processor
and you putting your passive and active cooling,
you're going to have the processor, some thermal paste,
the heat sink, and then the active fan on the top of that
to be able to cool that system down.
So if your thermal paste isn't sufficient,
you're not going to get good heat transfer
from the processor into the heat sink,
and this will have the processor over heating itself.
And this can cause intermittent reboot
or the system to be shutting itself down
to protect the processor.
So if you look at the CPU and it's overheating
but the CPU fan is operating normally,
this would indicate a problem with thermal transfer
between the processor and the heat sink,
and therefore you're going to want to take off the fan,
take off the heat sink, clean off the processor
and reapply a new layer of thermal paste,
and then put the heat sink and the fan back on.
Now, another area to consider when it comes to cooling
is not actually inside of your computer itself,
but it's actually in the room that the computer is in.
This is very common with server environments
where you have a server rack mounted
inside of a server cabinet,
and there's not adequate airflow in that cabinet.
This can lead to higher temperatures in the cabinet
which is on the outside of your system,
which then makes the system itself work harder
to try to cool itself down.
Because instead of bringing nice cold air over the system
through the fans, it's bringing hot air
from the rest of that server rack,
and this can be a problem.
So if you're operating a laptop or a desktop
in a hotter room or environment,
that can actually cause thermal problems
inside of your computer too.
In these cases, you're going to need to cool down the room
or move your system to another room
that has a cooler temperature,
because this can bring down the overall temperature
of that system in its operating environment.
As I said, this is a big issue
especially inside a server rooms.
And normally you'll be able to determine
that this is the issue,
if you're having multiple servers that are
having these same symptoms such as shutting down
or intermittent restarting,
because they're all having these high thermal loads.
In those cases, it's likely not the individual server
but instead it's the server rack
or the room that they're sitting in,
and therefore, you need to find the right space and cooling
for those servers in that rack to be able to bring down
the overall temperature of their environment.
So remember, when it comes to systems
if you're seeing things that are unusual
such as intermittent shutdowns or continual rebooting
after a certain amount of time,
normally this is going to point to a thermal issue,
and you need to look at the cooling
of your particular system
and the environment it's sitting in.