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Monitoring Your Laptop's Health?
paulius_g asks: "I have an eMachines laptop running Windows and I would like to know how today's geeks monitor their laptops caracteristics (CPU temperature, fan speeds, SMART, etc.) There are software to monitor normal motherboards, but laptop motherboards are usually unsupported on these kinds of software. I am in desperate need in such a software as my laptop overheats a lot while the fan is running at a low speed. So, what do you use to monitor your laptop?"
blow out the dust from the heat sink over the processor, and the one over the video card it it has one. dust makes for a great insulator, all the fan activity in the world won't help you out if you don't blow it out.
gkrellm for windows. http://www.redbog.com/products/gkrellm.aspx It also monitors fan, hard drive, and other temps, though you have to get an external program similar to lm_sensors - the name escapes me at the moment though.. I'm not running windows right now to check.
Ok, everyone knows on linux you use gkrellm, but on windows it's gotta be motherboard monitor http://mbm.livewiredev.com/
I use MobileMeter. It works perfectly for the three laptops I've owned and every one of my friends's laptops.
thomasdamgaard.dk.
eMachines laptops have a known overheating problem which causes these machines to simply power down when they reach a certain temperature.
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f amilyid=2898f8dd-10f8-4107-9f7b-16c5a525de1e&displ aylang=en] for XP which provides some cpu scaling support for AMD Powernow processors.
Overheating is caused by two factors on these machines: First unsufficient air flow through the cpu heatsink and fan caused by poor engineering. Second, dust buildup behind the heat sink.
The issue with dust buildup and system overheating is well known, see [http://www.dexplor.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=17
The solution to your problem involves periodicly clearing the heat sink of dust, and running a freeware cpu throttling program such as speedswitchxp. There is also a patch from Microsoft here [http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?
If you can get support from eMachines, send them your laptop and have them install a more powerfull fan for you.
eMachines did not manufacture these laptops. They were designed and manufactured by a company in Taiwan called Arima and were branded eMachines in North America. In Europe they were sold under the Medion label, and in Australia under TPG Online.
If I remember correctly, these machines do not reliably provide sensor data to any programs including MBM5. I don't think that has ever been fixed by eMachines.
As a further annoyance, eMachines' stock bios is full of errors, the most significant of which is that the cpu tables are incorrect. You will notice this if you try to install ACPI under linux.