Replacing CPU in Dell Dimension 4500 606

Ben Myers

Thanks for your informative post.

Being idly curious when the system was fairly new, I removed and replaced the heatsink. That upset the functioning of the factory-installed thermal pad. Then the system slowed down due to automatic thermal protection. I removed the pad and replaced it with white Radio Shack heat sink compound, and that made it run faster. But I am thinking that the CPU might have suffered some damage.

1) Every time I've ever run Memtest-86 it has hung the machine in about ten seconds, using any combination of five different memory sticks and two different video cards. Note that I had never run Memtest-86 until after the heat sink incident.

2) Windows XP hangs after I let it idle for some hours. I did a repair install without incident, but the system hangs partially (can move mouse pointer but ctrl-alt-del is ineffective) when doing Automatic Updates.

3) Linux runs fine (doesn't hang).

It would seem to be either PSU, motherboard, or CPU.