We struggle with overheating laptops

Usually, you do not pay attention to overheating of the laptop: “Well, you’ll warm yourself and let them warm up” But when it’s + 35 ° C outside and you’re holding an even hotter thing in your hands, you start to wonder if it’s time to change something. Go to a country where it is cooler, or buy a new laptop in an aluminum case? Or maybe you should just take some measures against overheating?

The article is presented thanks to Dear coderun , who provided an invite to Habr, for which he thanks a lot.

What leads to overheating?

The following are a number of major factors that lead to overheating of a laptop.

Climatic conditions (not to be confused with global warming!)

Probably the first reason for the overheating of laptops. After all, in winter, when it is cold outside, the houses are also not hot (hello to the municipal services of Kiev and personally Lena), then the ambient temperature itself contributes to the cooling of the devices. But as soon as summer arrives, + 35 ° C outside, they transfer laptops to the category of heating plates, on which it is easy to fry eggs.
To combat this factor, you can stock up on external cooling devices, since cooling coasters for laptops. On the Internet, many reviews of existing solutions, Google to help you. For myself, I purchased the Belkin F5L001 Cooling Platform through eBay. The stand cost £ 10.42 delivered from England.
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Negligence of manufacturers

Sometimes when developing devices, in a hurry to put them on the market, they make mistakes. Such errors may include weak air conditioning or improperly selected body material. Often, having pushed a lot of new technological things into a small box, there is not enough space to make a good cooling system layout.
For example, in my laptop is one fan and divorced copper radiator from under the fan to some kind of microcontroller. Everything else is left without adequate cooling.
In cases where the manufacturer acknowledges its mistake, it recalls the entire defective batch, such as it was with the Sony VAIO TZ or Dell Latitude D410 .

Household reasons

These include: dust deposits inside the laptop, poor cold air approach to the laptop cooling systems (for example, put a pillow on it, so as not to overheat :)), etc. In these cases, you should review the principle of working with a laptop, sit at the table for example ( I understand that I speak nonsense, but still). But in the fight against dust, it is necessary to prepare oneself with patience, valocordin and straight arms (no matter what valocordin would be needed), open the laptop and clean the dust. Note dared, the site which describes the operation of opening a lot of laptops from different manufacturers: repair4laptop.org

Software reasons, or what the system is loaded?

Overheating in these cases occurs when using the device with high loads on HHD, processors and / or controllers.
In my case, I did not launch any complex applications and did not play toys. But ... (see below)

How to detect overheating?

The main method remains: touch-hot. But in order to monitor the progress of cooling the laptop, you must use the program to monitor the temperature inside the laptop. For each operating system, there are their own programs that allow you to monitor the temperature of the processor, hard drive, fan speed, etc.

For windows

Download and install the Hardware sensors monitor . We get something like:

Then you can install add-ons to display information in the form of gadgets for Windows Vista:

In ubuntu

Used modules-sensors. To start working with them you need to run several commands:
sudo apt-get install lm-sensors sensors-applet
sudo sensors-detect
All sensors-detect questions are answered YES!
After that, add the Hardware Sensors Monitor applet to the panel and make the necessary settings. In the end, we reload Xs (so that all the sensor modules will pick up). This is how everything will look as a result:

For Mac OS

Here, probably, everything is also done in two teams and a couple of clicks with the mouse, but I can't tell you exactly how, due to the lack of suitable equipment.

Determine the source of overheating (in my example)

Go to the points of overheating factors:
1. Climatic conditions. Yes, it's hot at home, so I solved the problem by buying a stand for a laptop. It helped degrees by 10. But all the same, periodically temperature sensors on the cores fixed the temperature above 65 ° C.
2. Negligence of manufacturers. I dropped it, since I did not find a single post about problems with my laptop model (Sony VAIO VGN-FZ).
3. Domestic reasons. Made from dostochki flat smooth stand under the cooling stand (I apologize for the tautology). Did not help. He disassembled the laptop with shaking hands, gently blew it out of the dust (by the way it turned out not so much). He closed, turned on, the laptop turned on and at first showed the temperature within the normal range (45-50 ° C). But after a couple of hours of work, the former 65 ° C on the cores returned.
4. Software reasons. The technique is as follows: we look at what loads the system the most, we kill this process and observe how the temperature changes.
For Windows, even the built-in Windows Task Manager is suitable. To get the same information in Unix systems, you can use the console command top . After watching you can see what specifically loads the processor, even when you do not perform any actions.
In my case it was a vino-server. vino-server is a VNC server one of the pre-installed packages in Ubuntu. “Why is it even needed on laptops?”, You ask. For some personal reasons, I occasionally need to go to my home laptop from work and “move the cursor” (this is the easiest way to explain to my wife what to do when problems arise).
After killing all the vino-server processors ( killall vino-server ), the system somehow came to life and began to move at a speed not seen before. Then I turned off the vino-server from autoload: menu System-> Preferences-> Sessions-> Startup Programs. And after a reboot, it became noticeable that the laptop bask less than 20-25 degrees.

To replace vino, I advise you to use x11vnc.

results

The following are measurements of the core temperature of the processor and HDD with various combinations:

Device	stand + vino	stand + vino	stand + vino	stand + vino
HDD	65-70 °	63-67 ° C	45-46 ° C	51-52 ° C
Kernels	70-75 ° C	63-67 ° C	43-45 ° C	49-52 ° C

The measurements were made on the same hot summer day (06/17/09), for greater purity of the experiment.

Conclusion

Thus, I managed to lower the temperature of the laptop by 20-25 degrees. I hope someone my experience will help overcome the overheating on your laptop.