Windows: Cooling Pads - are they gimmicks?

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Rosenthal's flowchart

Finishing-up the assembly


Re-posted in The Star (Citizen's Blog)


Many of us who own laptops depend on a cooling pad to keep heat in check.


My old Dell was no different although it was not experiencing the dreaded thermal overload. While shopping for a pad, a college student told me that these marketing-gimmicks address the symptom rather the cause. The sweet-young-thing confidently said, when you troubleshoot a hot laptop, you first make sure the blowers and heat-sink are whistle clean and if that does not help, they should be speed-checked and replaced if necessary.


Not fully trusting her technical knowledge, I addressed the net and found a laptop-overheating Flowchart by Morris Rosenthal with a box at the bottom that appeared to confirm my friend’s advice.


Stripping the Dell was in order and I actually found the blowers and vents clogged. A chinese art brush and a hand held-vacuum unit were helpful in removing a whole lot of ‘grey ash and cotton’.


The old Dell has a large fan that draws air through the unit and a little one for the CPU beside the heat-sink and in accordance with my friend’s direction, my work was limited to making sure the fans operate and are whistle clean. I was not to meddle with anything else.


In the process, I installed a 2G DDR2 Kingston Ram Card (the maximum the architecture supports) in one of the two SODIMM slots, in place of the 512k and replaced the out-of-date 80G Hitachi IDE hard-drive with an equally out-of-date 160G Samsung IDE. I was not able to procure a 320 or even a 250G IDE as these old hard-drives, which were replaced by SATAs, were out of production.


Well, I did not follow my friend’s advice to fill both slots with a 1G Ram Card each but that is a subject of another post.


I must admit, the Dell now runs as cool as new and I am glad I did not get the pad.


Cheers, Tommy


Comments

  1. Morris RosenthalMarch 2, 2009 at 11:26 PM

    Tom,

    I'd say thanks for mentioning my laptop chart, except instead of linking it you seem to have copied the graphic (which is of limited use without the text), and which is also a web no-no. If you want you quote and excerpt, that's great, but you should attribute and link the source:

    http:\\www.daileyint.com\hmdpc\overheat.htm

    Morris

    ReplyDelete
  2. Tommy PetersMarch 3, 2009 at 7:02 AM

    Morris,

    It's an honor to have you come on board and you are right, I should have just linked the source. I will amend the blog as soon as possible.

    Prager paraphrased a verse on attribution. "When you steal a word and acknowledge it, you redeem yours to a higher level"

    Cheers love peace

    ReplyDelete

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