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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?"
And blow the dust out of it.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
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 always build one
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.
Hey, Retard (and no, I'm not insulting you, I'm just using the name YOU chose upon YOURSELF)...ever heard of common sense?
Throwing money at a problem is almost never the right solution.
If you're going to use Google, at least look for some answer to your question than some unrelated store. You're lucky that he said it was an overheating problem, or you'd've given us a nice page on buying new laptops and felt smart for it.
Actually, I have a way you could be useful. Why don't YOU pay for whatever stupid device you want him to get?
And why just 10 seconds of Googling instead of looking for something worthwhile? Is your attention span only 11 seconds?
(Yes, I'm getting abusive and trollish. I know. But honestly, does a guy named "Hey, Retard..." deserve any better?)
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.
Perhaps in your use-model there is no point, but not in mine. For example, I spent over 50% of my time with customers. When I'm in the office, it wouldn't make sense for me to use a different computer. So if I need to run a simulation, offline (from our equipment) protocol decoder, or copy a file (XP jab *grin*) I want my 2GHz. I don't mind only having full power available when I'm on AC.
So just because you don't see a need for something, doesn't mean there isn't one.
Your laptop is clearly defective. Why aren't you returning it?
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
Along the same lines, if you think cooling is the problem, and you are using your laptop in situations that would permit it's use, I would suggest something that gives a little more of a raise than extra large feet (although they certainly couldn't hurt). I use a griffin icurve, but there are plenty such products out there that will give your laptop a good boost allowing quite a bit of air to circulate around it. An added benefit is that with my particular desk and chair it raises my laptop to eye-level which has helped reduce neck strain after long hours of using it. I think that I got mine off ebay for like 30 bucks (I don't know what you would consider cheap, but for a lot of people that isn't exactly a bank breaker).
Dry Ice.
Shiny. Let's be bad guys.
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.
I take the "Ask Slashdot" stories to be like starting a discussion. Yes, you can probably find the answer in a few seconds yourself, but someone else who's only somewhat bothered by it might become interested and use one of the suggestions.
In this example, perhaps some other reader is getting a little annoyed by his laptop overheating, not but only a little. He doesn't feel like spending any real money on the solution as it's not a major problem. He reads the threads out of boredom and finds some simple or cheap solutions and decides to use them.
There are other examples of a person asking something I'd never even thought of. Reading the story and a few minutes later I'm considering doing something like that myself.
Remember, we're a slashdot community :-) Sometimes asking a question isn't just for personal gain but for group info.
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.
SpeedStep IS built into Windows XP. However, the Windows algorithm blows chunks.
http://pbus-167.com/ has Notebook Hardware Control, which can control SpeedStep, undervolt the processor (be careful with that one - it can kill stability), allow you to change the multiplier to any multiplier in a 1x increment from 6 to the max stock multiplier for your CPU (in your case, 16).
All SpeedStep does is lower and raise the multiplier as needed...