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Easy, Cheap, Effective Laptop Cooling?
cloudofstrife asks: "I happen to own a laptop that happens to have overheating problems. Frequently during games, the processor will overheat, and the frame rate will drop from over 30 frames per second to under 2 frames per second. Is there a cheap and easy way to prevent my CPU from overheating?"
Make sure that it is getting plenty of air. For example, are you using it on your lap? If the fan empties on the bottom of the case, your thighs will block the output and result in overheating. You could also trying rising your laptop with extra large plastic feat.
And blow the dust out of it.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
...ever hear of google?
/ Laptop_Cooling
Anyway, 10 seconds turned up this.
http://www.hardwarecooling.com/default.php/cat/33
Just put it in Hillary "Rodham" Clinton's lap.....ooooo. Ouch.
$6.21 is the number of the beast before sales tax. Meh.
Four of those little pink erasers (the ones shaped like a parallelogram) under the four courners of the laptop does a suprisinglly great job. It cut my cpu fan usage down by a good 80-90% for day to day usage.
If erasers are unavailable or you want less traction, mini-post it note pads work great as well. They may be preferred if you want to be able to slide the laptop out of the way when you're not using it.
Friend of mine ordered a Dell with a comprehensive on site service warranty. The laptop arrived, he installed a game, started playing, frame rate dropped, machine shutdown. He did this about 3 times then said screw it and called Dell. They sent out a technician the same day, the guy replaced the video card, it never happened again.
How we know is more important than what we know.
You could stop playing games on your laptop. Obviously, this seems to be the source of your problems.... heh.
"It was hell!" recalls former child.
A couple of workarounds, not fixes.
Turn down the CPU speed, if your laptop supports it.
Place a large flat ice-pack underneath (you can find some with a grid of square cooling units connected so as to be flexible and fit nicely along the edges of coolers).
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
You could always build one
Don't use a laptop as a gaming machine..but it's too late for that, so that won't help you. I just bought a Dell Inspiron 2200 with a Pentium M at 1.7Ghz, and it idles around 40-45C. When I'm gaming and the CPU is maxed and fan is on low, it only goes up to 55C..I think it shuts down around 65-80C.
Anyways, there are professional laptop coolers you can order from various computer sites. They're basically a fan that sits below the intakes underneath the laptop, which means it's just as easy to build your own. Use a standard 12V fan and run it on 5V (USB is 5V). Quiet, plenty of air, and you'll get much lower temps with and without your standard fan.
Honestly, there's no point to more than 2Ghz on a laptop..especially with a P4 or latest AMD chips. Way too hot, and way too much power usage.
Death by snoo-snoo!
You need:
Take your syringe and cut it in half. My memory is a bit patchy about this bit, I did it a long time ago. 2 to 2.5 cm should be long enough (from the tip). Lubricate the inside of the tube. Again, I can't remember what I lubricated it with, but saliva works well, particularly when it comes to smoothing down imperfections in the glue while it is still hot. Fill the 2 cm of tube. Allow it to cool and pull out the glue plug. Repeat four or 5 times. Cut these cylinders down to size, 1 or 1.5 cm should do it. If for some reason they are not all the same height, instead of hacking away until there's nothing left, take a vice and place them all in it, and tighten slightly. Apply a hairdryer to the whole thing until the glue has adopted it's new shape. Allow to cool and remove the glue feet.
You're done. You now have small, rubbery, cheap feet for your laptop. They will even stick ever so slightly to case if it's warm, convenient if you want to pick it up briefly.
I carry these little feet in my laptop bag, and they help reduce the procesor temp. You don't have to use all four, you can just prop up the back and it will help.
Hope someone finds this useful.
Paul
My motorbike travels in Chile.
Your laptop is clearly defective. Why aren't you returning it?
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
It's definitely not as portable as the hot glue pads above, but it does its job well on my desk and keeps the heat away from my legs on the couch.
If you want more info, there's Antec's Website, a quick Google search turned up a good review, and they're all over eBay and Froogle.
But the frame rate dropping to 2, is an indicator that the CPU HAS slowed down.
Dry Ice.
Shiny. Let's be bad guys.
If you don't mind building up your laptop a little bit, get an 80mm fan and place it in front of wherever your laptop intake is. Run it to the 5v USB line, or a 12v firewire line (5v USB ought to be enough, but some laptops don't power their USB line). Make sure to give this fan an opening... if on the bottom, give it enough feet to get a good, clear airflow.
If you have a standard workspace, build a cool stand. Take an old monitor stand, mount some fans underneath pointing upwards, and drill a heck of a lot of holes. If you get really quiet fans, and feed them off of a 5v wall wart, you can run them constantly without any noticable noise. Or give your laptop some little rubber feet, and run the fans across the desk (though that has the annoyance of blowing air across your hands).
You can also take the fan and run it into a plastic bladder with holes poked in it. This gets targeted air underneath your laptop, but usually looks terrible.
And if it is overheating in your lap: open your legs. Nothing cools a laptop faster than spreading them. No seriously, it improves the airflow and... why are you all snickering? Geeze... Kids.
The ______ Agenda
You asked how to cool your laptop. There are any number of laptop stands with fans built in. The ones I've seen run off of USB power. I just bought my wife one from Fry's which was $25. Amazon has one here. Just do a simple search for "latop stand fan" or something.
If your brand new PC overheats and causes problems, maybe you should be returning it or getting some warranty service performed.
What should I tell my friend that is Iraq to do about his labtop shutting now?He can't lower CPU speed. He has the fans that you put underneath the labtop. Any idea?
Step 1: Buy some compressed air. Step 2: Hold aerosol can upside down. Step 3: Step 4: Point nozzle through ventilation holes towards laptop CPU heat sink. Step 5: Spray. Works like a charm. I'm not even joking.
----- "All right. It was a miracle. Can we go now?"
lego, do I need to explain ?
I was using my laptop to transfer old CDROMs onto an USB hardisk and the unit was getting so hot the disk when ejected almost burned the skin.
I created a lego four sided wall (four blocks high) just smaller than the base of the laptop and added lots of holes, the heat was reduced tremndously.
I used only classic 2x4s.
ERR 411[Max number of witty sigs reached]
Temporary remove the battery if it's not in need of charging. The brand we use at my company runs the fan regularly, we started removing the battery from our laptops when an adapter was near and the fan only ran once or twice per day instead of every 10 minutes.
I have a x1000 with Pentium 1.6GHz. I find that unless I do some CPU intensvie job like kernel compiling my CPU freq stays at 600Mhz. Therefore the fan turns on rarely - for example only when I play tuxracer/kernel compiling. Is such a speed step built in windows XP also? Because when I keep the system on in XP every 20 min or so the fan kicks in? Is it normal or...
If you remember what these are (I bet the young'uns may not in the DVD area), these make an excellent laptop stand. Put the back of the laptop on the tape, let the front of the laptop sit on your table. Not only will it improve cooling, it will put your keyboard at a more comfortable angle.
Other solutions - Make sure your heatsink and fans are clean. If your laptop used to be fine and is now overheating, it is probably because of dust accumulation. Also potentially use a software solution that increases fan speed. I use i8kFanGUI on my Dell Inspiron 8200 under Windows, and i8kmon from i8ktools under Linux. Both allow you to increase the fan speed above BIOS defaults, yet retain temperature control. (The BIOS defaults tend towards allowing a very hot machine.) As posted by others, "always-on" solutions will wear out your fans early. If you hear any signs that your fans are dying (buzzing, etc), replace them. Almost all laptop manufacturers sell replacement fans.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
As someone who uses syringes multiple times a day (type 1 diabetic), a 5cc syringe is HUGE!
:) I'm pretty sure insulin syringes are the most common syringes in existence, as Type 1 diabetes the most common disease that can be treated only with injections.
I use 3/10cc on a regular basis.
Finding a 5cc syringe legally is going to be tough. Well, finding ANY syring 100% legally will be tough, but at least the sub-CC ones can usually be obtained from one of your diabetic friends.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
The Air Hose I find doesn't have any dust in it?
(I'll get my coat)
I had an old Dell notebook that overheated (enough to stop PCMCIA cards from working). I found it odd that the fans never really ran much. I found a BIOS update that lowered the temparature thresholds of when to start and stop the CPU fans. That helped a bit. Then I found a program called i8kfan that allowed me to choose the temperatures at which to turn the fans on, or to force them on. This helped a lot -- I never had problems again except for when I wasn't running i8kfan. The program works on most Dell laptops. I've seen similar programs for other vendors. There's also an i8kfan driver available for Linux, and I think Linux' APM and/or ACPI drivers have some generic fan controls that work for some notebooks.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
Stop. Playing. Games.
I'm about 90% certain of this, we just had the same thing happen on 2 laptops a few weeks back. Why the guys at work were playing games... well... let's not go there...
We would get a slow down after 5-15 minutes of game play, exit the game and everything was normal in maybe 30 seconds. During this time the CPU fan was running like a banshee. We figured it was the CPU overheating so we ran prime95 on it for 2 hours with no trouble. We ran Cinibench and had no problem. We ran tests on the memory and hard drive and found nothing. The trouble would only appear in games, we reinstalled the drivers, even tried beta drivers, and no luck...
Finnally as luck would have it one of the guys wanted to compare his laptop performance to his computer at home and he ran 3D Mark on it. BAM! the problem occured in the middle of the test.
Anyway, we finnally called tech support after messing around for 3 days, and managed to get to somebody who could tell us what was happening after around 2 hours on the phone.
Turns out that there was a batch of mobile graphics chips that just wasn't quite up to snuff, they simply put out too much heat, something like 30% over what the max spec said. We sent our laptops in and had them back in a few days with new video cards and they problem was solved.
Hope this helps!
I own an Apple iBook G4 (1 GHz model). The first thing I bought for it was a copy of Halo. Yes, I know laptops are not meant for gaming, but I couldn't resist. My laptop, on battery power, pulling a light load (e-mail, IM, web browsing) it runs around 90F. Pulling a heavier load, on battery, the system runs more like 110F. Pulling a heavy load on AC power, the machine maxes out at 150F, and the (remarkably small) fan (singular) manages to keep the laptop from getting any hotter.
I've owned two other laptops, both Toshibas. One was a Portege (486), the other was a Tecra 520CDT. No idea how hot they ran, but after a point, the Tecra's fan kicked in, and would manage to keep the machine coool, no matter what it was pulling.
My friend's iBook (1.5 Ghz) has no reported overheating problems.
I've taken my iBook apart, I know how small it is, and how cramped it is. By my estimations, it must be a ventilation nightmare. The hottest point is near the center of the laptop, right under my keyboard. It has one itty bitty fan, near the back of the computer, where there's a screen. This machine should be hot, it should not be easy to cool. Yet this machine manages to stabilize. "Yeah, but that's just 1 GHz, running a PowerPC chip that Apple bought because it runs cool." Hence the small fan.
My teacher's monsterous HP Pavilion laptop runs a more power hungry, and hotter Pentium chip of some kind, as well as a high powered GPU with a dual head. He has a pair of gigantic fans on the bottom of his laptop, and has much higher ground clearance. It's got heatsyncs right up to the vents, etc. etc.
This machine runs hotter, so it was designed to accomdate that. Your laptop should have been designed to accomdate the heat output. If it is unable to handle it, it is either (A) A design flaw or (more likely) (B) Defective.
Have the manufacturer look at and repair it.
Rawr