Laptop seems to be overheating?

[Skipweasel]

Dell manage it with their laptops on a regular basis. The damned things just don't run flat out reliably.

[The Natural Philosopher]

I have enough experience of fixing a few to know that they are marginal beats, and to be avoided if you want to do serious computing.

Twice the price and half the power and reliability. Who needs that?

People who read glossy brochures and spend their lives on trains it seems.

And you have zero experience of commercial hardware or software design.

[The Natural Philosopher]

You obviously have no experience on anything at all, and are lying through your back teeth, according to M@B&Q

:-)

[The Natural Philosopher]

Whatever. YOU try arguing that with a customer who has taken your fan blown rack and put it in an airtight flightbox and operated it in the African sun for 10 hours non stop. Till the cutouts went.

At least the cutouts DID go, so there was no repair to be done.

[Man at B&Q]

LOL! It's form that experience that I know what PCs and laptops are capable of when running the design tools. They are regularly maxed out at 100% CPU usage with no overheating or shutting down in sight.

MBQ

[Lobster]

OP again - having stirred up a hornet's nest with my apparently innoccuous question...!

"Labour-intensive" - yes I meant the machine, not me.

No if the machine is sitting idle then CPU usage is trivial. However (eg) the other night I was attempting to download all the necessary updates for my newly reinstalled Office 2003 installation and had MS Update doing its thing, analysing my machine to determine what updates were required - this took usage up to 100% (looking at the processes involved via Task Manager, svchost.exe accounted for about 86% and iexplorer.exe about 13%). It was doing this for something like 30-45 mins before cutting out and powering down (without completing the analysis AFAIK).

I repeated this today and it completed the analysis and downloaded about

100 updates, all OK; it hasn't cut out today at all. It's currently sitting here idling at about 2% CPU usage.

(FWIW I tried out Speedfan to no avail - don't know what's wrong but when I fire it up it seems to loads like a memory-resident program - no 'front end', no settings I can see etc, but I can see 'speedfan' processes (but *not* 'applications') listed under Task Manager).

To answer other queries/suggestions - yes I definitely hoovered out all the vents and fan; have had the laptop in bits but there was nothing in there to clog things up as I suspected there might.

Really can't go with linux - this is a family machine and although I wouldn't be averse to trying it, there's no way the rest of the crew here would go along!

Thanks David

[The Natural Philosopher]

aain, how much time was spent accessing the DISK and not the RAM..I am not familiar with windows tools much, but if the machine was in fact spending mos f its time waiting for the DISK, the CPU would not have been doing that much. Disks are big power consumers, especially if the bearings are drying out..

which is what most computers spend most of their time doing.

To be honest, unless they are very computer literate, most would not even notice the difference.

The Gnome default desktop is terribly windows like. Clicking on an icon opens a web browser same as on any other platform, or there are menus.

Most people who are NOT used to computers find a well set up linux system EASIER to use than Mac or PC. Basically because its possible to strip it down to just what they need and organise it into simple un confusing things.

[Adrian C]

If their expectations of getting anything done is low. Email and Web browsing yeah, a good build of Linux is ideal.

However, to do anything greater with heavier weight applications that author multimedia for instance, non-technical users fare much better in Windows IMO. For a start, Windows applications are easier to find, install, configure, and use without asking too many support questions.

The common Linux distributions are just over the place requiring patience that demanding users simply won't have. Edit this text file, use this command line switch, type 'sudo', 'grep' this regular expression, are you serious?

[The Natural Philosopher]

I have been running this rig for about 18 monts now.

I never use any of those commands Or have edited a text file apart from programming PHP and so on on the server. No, tell a lie, I edited the digital TV channels listing to get a better selection than the default that the program came up with. The wife's mac running paid for code is stick with the way it presents the channels,

Its all precisely the same stuff - firefox, thunderbird, open office, and the Gimp. Click on DVD and watch it. Click on audio file and play it.

I am the only person that I know who even goes NEAR heavyweight video editing.

If I want a new program, I select it in synaptic and it installs itself.

No regedit thank f*ck. No hours of searching through online tips to find out how to turn off some 'feature' that the bill gates pension fund decides I must have, when I don't want it or need it.

And reboots are far less frequent.

only occasionally when accessing files 50 miles away will the desktop hang..and that's normally just a desktop reload,. not a complete boot.

Its ideal r a newbie USER, IF there is a cometent person to set it up. But then people come to me to set their macs up..no one we know well uses a winpee cee anymore anyway.

[Man at B&Q]

LOL! At Plessey we had proper environmental test chambers. Sums up your experience really.

Except that a PC is running *multiple* "applications", each of which can/will peak at different times. hence the overall system *can* be required to hammer the CPU for extended periods. PCs are designed with this in mind.

Yes, I've done this too.

Straw man, getting desperate now atre you?

MBQ

[Man at B&Q]

Which is a hardware fault :-)

MBQ

[John Rumm]

Although sometimes circumvented with software...

I had an old Dell Latitude that developed a fault where it ran its fan flat out all the time and complained about over temperature. Spoke to their support people, and they had me install a new BIOS image on it, which "fixed" it. Reading between the lines, there was a known fault with the sensor sensitivity drifting, and the BIOS update just tweaked the thresholds for the fan control etc.

[Man at B&Q]

There are lots of things you can do in software to mitigate hardware issues, Doesn't mean it was a software bug in the first place.

MBQ

[John Rumm]

What's you specialised subject - the bleeding obvious?

I remember one protracted spell of development a couple of decades back where there was lots of pressure to get the built in test software integrated into a FLIR system. As soon as it was complete, there was lots of pressure to ever widen an weaken the test suit so that it did not keep failing stuff that was partly broken!