Acer Travelmate 2700

[hairygrape]

A neighbour of mine asked me to have a look at the Acer laptop he bought "off a mate" for the grand sum of £40.00. He needed me to delete old software off the laptop and change the Username on the machine. The laptop has XP home installed and device manager shows that it has a Intel Quad processor fitted running at 3MHz.
The laptop accepted the change of username in the user accounts section and I set it to boot without asking for a password. The laptop rebooted but with the password screen in place even though I had applied the changes. I tried a couple of possible passwords suggested by the neighbour but they did not work. The previous owner of the laptop has gone abroad, so I couldn't seek his help.
I next tried formatting the laptop with a view to installing Vista. During the installation of Vista, the screen went blank and the installation stopped. The laptop had somehow switched itself off. On trying the power button, the laptop beeped and the fan came on for a few seconds then the laptop powered down. On a couple of occassions, the laptop stays on long enough for the Acer logo to appear, but not long enough to get into the bios via the F2 key. If I open the drive and insert the Vista disc and then boot up, the drive turns for around a second but can't install Vista as again the laptop powers down.
Powering up with the mains adaptor makes no difference as the same thing happen if I power up via the internal battery. I just can't get the laptop to stay on.

Thanks for your help.

[ChuckFickens]

Sounds like it's over heating, the CPU fan and heatsink are probably clogged up with fluff.

Find the airvents and give them a good suck through with a hoover is the quick fix, the proper fix is dismantle and clean out properly.

(BTW it's not a intel quad CPU, it's a pentium 4 CPU, which is only a single core CPU)

[hairygrape]

Many thanks ChuckFickens. I spent a good few minutes vacuuming fluff out of the air vents and both fans on the underside of the laptop. The laptop then managed to stay on long enough to load Vista HP onto it. Despite the laptop having only 512MB and 256 MB memory modules installed, it works reasonably OK with Vista and the owner's happy as long as he's able to run MS Office and get on the internet, both of which the laptop does comfortably. It does show messages though that it's rated only 1.0 on the Vista performance scale so it's a long way off being able to run Photoshop!

Thank you again for your help. You put me on the right track!