Overheating: Enemy Number One - Comments Page 1

I got two utilities, Core temperate and Speed fan if needed I use it. There is no doubt we must take care of dust and clean it from time to time for smooth air flow.

I have found using Cooling fan under laptop is very helpful too. Also we must not put laptop on flat surface.

Laiptops can benefit from a "laptop cooling pad" which includes one or more fans ... saves your legs as well. They are cheap too.
jbs/

I'd like to add a variation of what you experienced. My computer shut down after a period of operation. I opened the case and started it back up and everything seemed to be okay, all fans were working with no noise. I eventually found a fan speed program and monitored the fan speed on the graphics card. After a period of time, the grahpics card fan started to slow down. That is when the temp went up and eventually shut the unit down.

Bob,
Another good free utility for Temps and computer operating info is "Speccy".
George

thank you.
my 8 year old 17" dell inspiron 9300 needed that, due to an often oddly sounding fan in the back.
God bless!

I prefer to use a program from Acronis called Drive Monitor. It is free in their download section.

It monitors more than temperature but that is one feature I like. I can set the thresholds at whatever I want but it comes preset at 107 degrees F for warning and 125 degrees for critical. My wife's laptop seems to run a little warmer than anyone elses in my family. Not sure if I should be concerned but she rarely uses it more than an hour or two at any one time.

I should have mentioned in my previous post that the Acronis Drive Monitor is for hard drives only and does not monitor the CPU temperature.

Strange that this was the next question I hoped you'd address. OK so mid 150*F (70*C-71*C) is the optimal range. Just yesterday I did a search of lap-top coolers. and found some VERY simplistic 19th century solutions: if a little air doesn't work, throw even more at it until it does work!

ALL solutions seemed to be virtually the same. My office-mate at the U and I used a Liquid Nitrogen compressor stolen from the Physics/Bio Lab for our Desk Tops, and at home I now have a home made coil made from a refrigerator (in essence) wrapped inside a couple of pieces of 2.5" PVC pipe through which some 12 VDC fans blow a couple of streams of air down the tunnels with an evaporating pan under the desk.(I live in NoCal so don't have much humidity problem). -- I could not find one to buy when I looked on-line under 'DESK TOP COOLERS' (and related terms).

Only more fans to increase the air-flow, and with summer time temps in my office were climbing towards 125*F (no A/C, swamp coolers) I'd be better off just taking the case off and putting a couple of WallyWorld fans blowing over the entire mother board, CPU, GPU, and RAM (it's not just the CPU any more) if I didn't have the compressor (read: refer) going.

But with a new i-7 with high mid-end NVIDA GPU in the middle of Nevada, blowing ~40*C air only gives a differential of about 10*C. Again the ONLY solution I found was a dual fan pad, or warranty violating things like tear apart the case silver paste or copper plates with larger fans). I can handle 12VDC fans as I often have multiple charged 12VDC auto-truck batteries around (engine or solar charged) CPU/GPU at close to 100% on hot Nevada Afternoons without blowing more and more grit and dust into my "sealed" box? And I'm only running a 15" Toshiba with 12 Gigs of RAM -- Not some Monster 17" dual i-7 clocking at over 3-5 GHz????

I know when we used the LNx we significantly increased our speed, but I can't recall to what, but it must have been the equal of today's 'fast' machines.

DO YOU MEAN THE ONLY WAY TO 'COOL' A LAP TOP (WITH THE TECHNOLOGY TO RUN OUR ROVER ON MARS) IS TO BLOW MORE AIR AT IT? No one makes a reasonably priced (~$100-$150) off-the-shelf liquid cooler that can be quick connect-disconnect and run from 12VDC?

And what about the transformer that plugs into the wall - mine gets hotter than an 81mm WP mortar on impact.

ANY HELP OUT THERE AT ALL??????????? HELP!!!!!

Dear Bob,
I'm freaking out!
I installed the latest SpeedFan, opened it and got (for the first ever with my 3-year-old PC with Vista)...a BLUE SCREEN!
Naturally, I went to Control Panel to delete it --and received the dialog box about removing something called GIVEO (I did), but the computer doesn't work as well as usual.
When I went to "System Restore," it was unable to restore the system due to "an error"!
I'm under pressure to finish a book edit and need feedback WHAT TO DO, desperately!!

Thank you!

Dust always finds a way to my H-P Pavilion Elite m9040n. There's 1 vent on the left side of the case, 2 on the right side, plus 2 fan exhausts on the rear. All get their fair share of dust. I gently brush vacuum all portals and the front of the pavilion whenever I see an accumulation forming. Every other month, I disconnect everything and take the unit to the garage and remove the side panels. I disable the fans with plastic rods, which prevents damage via overspin of the fan blades. Since I have an air compressor, I blow a very low pressure stream of air to all surfaces. It's amazing how many "dust bunnies" get removed! I can't emphasize enough how important it is to: 1. Disable the fans; 2. Use low pressure; 3. Don't touch any components with the air nozzle. In fact, I'm super selective when it comes to sharing this info. (There are people out there who should not even be operating light switches)

In my experience, cleaning out the computer to remove dust does wonders in this regard.

Purists won't like it but I usually use the vacuum cleaner in reverse (blow instead of suck) and a can of compressed air for harder-to-reach spots.

By similarly cleaning all the fans, there is also a great reduction in noise.

Hello - I just clicked the link for SpeedFan. That page tells me lots of info about their creation, but NO INFO about installing it or using it. Do you have to be a computer techie person to use it? Am I missing something obvious? What link would you suggest for us novices that need a user-friendly utility for their PC?

EDITOR'S NOTE: Click the Download link near the top of the page (next to Screenshots). On the next page, look for "The latest version is..." You'll find the download link there. Just beware, there might be some misleading "DOWNLOAD" ads on the site. Avoid those.

great work bob.

Sometimes the BIOS will have fan settings and adjustable max temperature settings.

The points that you make are all very good. My system has variable speed fans and when the system really gets working hard you can hear the fans speed up. When they don't slow down quickly after the extra intense work is done I know that it is time to crack open the case and clean the dust off of the components. My big problem has been trying to get the dust out of the fins on the CPU heat sink. Although there is a clamp holding the heat sink in place that is fairly easy to release that is not the only thing holding it in place. It appears to be held by screws as well. In the past I had used a 3/4" paint brush to attempt to remove the dust. It could not reach all of the deepest places in between the fins. I have never tried canned air as I have found that blowing dust around is not completely effective. From my experience with blowing dust in a wood shop I have found that there is always a thin film of dust that blowing will not remove.
Last time I cleaned the dust from inside my computer case I used a vacuum to remove most of the dust in the case, but there is still a thin film of dust on the components. I used the paint brush to stir that up so it could be vacuumed away. But the dust still remained on the heat sink fins. I found brush that looks like a very small bottle brush, the bristles forming a column that is less than 1/4" in diameter. I slid that between each of the fins while holding the vacuum nozzle nearby. Since doing that at the start of the summer I have not had any incidents of run away fans.

Piriform de-fraggler, a free program that among other things constanly measures the health and temperature of your PC.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Defraggler measures only your hard drive temps.

I have used core temp with rainmeter's app for it, and have it notify me when it's getting close to dangerous. Having the task manager handy is good too, for if I'm running my digital comic app and a video conversion program it starts to overheat my comp. I can usually pause my conversion, grab my laptop cooling pad, and can resume. But can close the comic app if things get out of control otherwise.

JAY B. ----- RE: BRUSHES:

i THINK WHAT YOU MEAN ARE 'INTRA-DENTAL ORAL CARE BRUSHES'. They are about the thickness of a pipe-cleaner only about a half --or a bit less -- in Diameter. And can be bought at nearly any drug store. Often they are better than other 'brushes' because many brands have a NYLON CARRIER - which means the brushes are attached by Nylon rather than placed in twisted metal (a very good conductor: To paraphrase Shiva, through a paraphrase of Oppenheimer: "I am Become Death" to your computer). There are many shapes, I find that the conical (as opposed to the 'cylinder' shaped) are the most useful shape, though I really wonder how much good such work would accomplish in a time-cost-benefit/life expectancy of your computer analysis.

I use canned "air' cleaners out in the desert and a low pressure nozzle on an air compressor to blow out my computer when I give it the 'complete' cleaning twice a year (spring and just before winter, call it mid-Autumn) and about a 10-15 minute (start to stop) 'blowout' every couple of months. You hold the fans in place with wooden dowels to clean them off so they don't spin on you, though I find an anti-static cloth FAR more effective than air but there are many ways to skin a cat.

I REALLY hope that someone out there has a solution other than throwing more air at a board (CPU-GPU-RAM). Many of us use our Lap-Tops as tools that don't sit on pillows, but either in our lap, on a flat 'desk' surface, or on the seat next to us in our FWD. Often it's easier to enter numbers 5 or 10 at a time, than it is to do the mind-numbing entries at the end of the day.

I mean, really, The ONLY solution is to throw more air at something to cool it?, nothing made to filter or cool the air at all?

Great topic!

A friend's Dell desktop shut down shortly after starting. We discovered the plastic bracket holding the heat sink to the CPU had broken and wasn't in contact anymore. New brackets were very available online, varying in cost from over $10 to $1.23 (shipping included from China). Repaired the broken one with fine safety wire. Works fine now.

Same problem with a laptop, and cleaning the cooling air inlet solved that one.

Mayonnaise works as thermal paste if you don't have any "real" stuff. http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/Thermal-Compound-Roundup-February-2012/1490/5

The only thing CoreTemp did for my Lenovo Vista desktop was lock it up and required a re-boot. Have dual Intel CPUs but the MB may have had issues. Not sure the BIOS/MB has temp sensor capability anyway so maybe that's why. The P/S fan does a roar at boot (and sometimes is accompanied by a small cloud of dust...) then settles down so I know it is a variable speed fan. Haven't looked inside so don't know if there are any other fans (eg CPU fan) in there. The plastic figurine I keep on top of the case hasn't melted yet so, so so far so good...