Posts Tagged ‘high temperatures’

How hot is your Laptop?

How many rea­ders have a lap­top? I would say alot, they are much chea­per and much more func­tio­nal then the lap­tops of the old days.  Some are almost as cheap as a desk­top.  That cou­pled with how easy a wire­less net­work is to set up and how many public area offer free WiFi for on the road, makes a lap­top a good invest­ment now a days.

But have you tried to ever sit with one on your lap some­ti­mes?  Well ima­gine the tem­pe­ra­ture inside the case and ima­ging what it is doing to your CPU(s).

For those that may not be aware of what high tem­pe­ra­tu­res can do, it cause cause hard­ware pro­blems or even cause soft­ware to freeze up and crash.

To see the CPU tem­pe­ra­ture, there is a few free pro­grams out there.  The first is Real Temp.  It is a small down­load that you ins­tall and bam you see the temp of your Intel processor(s).  It does show a lot of infor­ma­tion, but for most users you will need only the mini­mum and maxi­mum temp, the current CPU load, and the ther­mal indi­ca­tors.  Another I have used in the past is Speed­Fan.  I per­so­nally like Speed­Fan bet­ter, I find it gives bet­ter infor­ma­tion as well as infor­ma­tion con­cer­ning S.M.A.R.T. hard drives.

For Macs, though I can test it, there is a uti­lity for Mac OSX — smcFanControl2.  If you are a Mac user and try this, please let me know how it works.

For the heat to your legs, I recom­mend get­ting a lap­top cushion you can find almost anywhere, or I have a bel­kin base that actually has a fan that runs cold air up at the bot­tom of your lap­top to cool it down. My base usually drops the CPU temp about 5–6 degrees Cel­sius.  I highly recom­mend loo­king for one.