Fighting laptop overheating

Usually you do not pay attention to overheating a laptop: “Well, it’s warming itself, and let it warm. But when on the street + 35 ° С and you hold an even hotter little thing in your hands, you begin to wonder if it's time to change something. Travel to a country where it's cooler, or buy a new laptop in an aluminum case? Or maybe you should just take some measures against overheating?

The article was presented thanks to Dear coderun , who provided an invite to Habr, for which many thanks to him.

What leads to overheating?

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

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

Probably the first frequent cause of overheating of laptops. Indeed, in winter, when it is cold outside, the house is also not hot (hello to the municipal services of the city of Kiev and personally to Lyonya), then the ambient temperature itself helps to cool the devices. But as soon as summer arrives, + 35 ° C on the street, laptops are transferred to the category of heating stoves, on which it is easy to fry fried eggs.
To combat this factor, you can stock up on external cooling devices, because cooling coasters for laptops. On the Internet there are many reviews of existing solutions, Google will help you. For myself, I purchased the Belkin F5L001 Cooling Platform through eBay. The stand cost £ 10.42 with delivery from England.

Negligence of manufacturers

Sometimes, when developing devices, in a hurry to launch them on the market, mistakes are made. Among such errors can be both a weak air conditioning system and improperly selected case material. Often stuffing a lot of new technological things into a small box, there is not enough space to make a good wiring of the cooling system.
For example, in my laptop there is one fan and a copper radiator from the fan is bred to a microcontroller. Everything else is left without adequate cooling.
In cases where the manufacturer admits his mistake, he withdraws the entire defective batch, as for example with Sony VAIO TZ or Dell Latitude D410 .

Household reasons

These include: dust deposits inside the laptop, a poor approach of cold air to laptop cooling systems (for example, put it on a pillow so that it doesn’t burn :)), etc. In these cases, you should reconsider the principle of working with a laptop, sit down at a table for example ( I understand that I’m talking nonsense, but still). But in the fight against dust, you need to prepare yourself with patience, a valokordin and straight arms (so that a valokordin would not be needed), open a laptop and clean it from dust. To a decided decision, the site on which the opening operations of many laptops from different manufacturers are described : repair4laptop.org

Software reasons, or how is the system loaded?

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

How to detect overheating?

However, the main method remains: touched, hot. But in order to monitor the progress of cooling the laptop, you must use a program for monitoring the temperature inside the laptop. For each operating system, there are programs that allow you to monitor the temperature of the processor, hard disk, fan speed, etc.

For windows

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

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

In ubuntu

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

For mac os

Here, probably, everything is done in two teams and a couple of clicks of 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)

We go over the points-factors of overheating:
1. Climatic conditions. Yes, it's a little hot at home, so I solved the problem by buying a laptop stand. It helped by 10 degrees. But anyway, periodically temperature sensors on the cores recorded a temperature above 65 ° C.
2. Negligence of manufacturers. I threw it off, because I did not find a single post about problems with my laptop model (Sony VAIO VGN-FZ).
3. Domestic reasons.I made an even, smooth stand under the cooling stand (I apologize for the tautology). Did not help. He dismantled the laptop with trembling hands, gently blew it away from dust (by the way, it turned out to be not so much). He closed it, turned it on, the laptop turned on, and at first it showed the temperature within the normal range (45-50 ° C). But after a couple of hours of work, the previous 65 ° C on the cores returned.
4. Software reasons. The technique is this: we look at what loads the system the most, 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 on Unix systems, you can use the console command top. After observing, you can see what specifically loads the processor, even when you are not doing anything.
In my case, it was a vino-server. vino-server is a VNC server one of the pre-installed packages in Ubuntu. “Why do we even need it on laptops?”, You ask. For some personal reasons, I periodically 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 ( killall vino-server) processors , the system seemed to come to life and began to move at an unprecedented speed. Next, disconnected the vino-server from startup: menu System-> Preferences-> Sessions-> Startup Programs. And after a reboot, it became noticeable that the laptop basked at less than 20-25 degrees.

To replace vino, I advise you to use x11vnc.

results

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

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

Measurements were taken 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 helps my experience to overcome overheating on my laptop.