Summer is well under way. In fact, it's been the hottest July I've ever experienced since 2010. It's annoying and uncomfortable but we just have to deal with it. Along with this discomfort, I've come to experience a new problem with heat. My laptop. It's a Dell Vostro 1320 that I bought in Feb 2010. After about a year of use, the battery got screwed up and I didn't really bother because I use it almost like a desktop that always sits on a table. I don't even use it on my lap or the bed.
Obviously, heat was a major issue. The table is pretty old and most of the polish is gone so it feels like the table is not really helping in letting the heat from the laptop escape. I used a plastic object to try and create a little more gap between the laptop and the table so that the heat would escape with ease. But it was a bit uncomfortable to use the laptop so I discarded that idea. I looked online and found that people use cooling pads under their laptops to keep them cool.
At this point (a couple of months ago) I really started wondering what temperatures I'm really dealing with here. I downloaded a couple of apps like CoreTemp and SpeedFan. They seemed to suggest that my laptop was definitely heating a lot. There were times when the temperature shot up to nearly 100C when the TJMax was listed as 105C. It was a bit scary. Only once ever did my laptop actually shut down due to over heating. And there was one time when my screen went crazy and I got the blue screen. I assumed that was because of the heat as the laptop felt like it was quite literally on fire. And all this happened with just playing some videos or doing some graphic design work. I haven't played any games in the last 2 years. I just didn't want to allow over heating and shut down issues to repeat. I had some more issues later. A lot of times, the display just went blank. The screen seemed to turn off. I later discovered that when viewed at a certain sharp angle, I could faintly see what was on the screen. This meant that the screen was still showing but the backlight was gone. I could manage to shut the laptop down safely and get the screen back up on restart. I had to do something to fix this problem!
I went back to looking at cooling pads and found a really cheap one for just 2 bucks. I almost considered it just an experiment without investing too much money. So by spending 4 bucks in total, I was getting a laptop cooling pad with 3 fans shipped home. I read some reviews that it was extremely flimsy and wasn't useful anywhere but a flat table. Some actually reported it to be broken at arrival. The day that I got mine, I was shocked to know that there's a laptop cooling pad inside the box that arrived. I wouldn't have been surprised to see just a piece of paper and nothing else. It was extremely light, weighing just a few grams with the packaging. When I opened the box, my worst fears came true. The pad was cracked. It wasn't in 2 pieces but definitely cracked. At this point I thought, it's not even worth sending back. I might as well, just try to tape it up and experiment with it. After all, it cost me only $4.
The pad was definitely the flimsiest i've ever seen. If I had to move it, I would do it extreme care. It felt like even the slightest excessive force would break it into 2. Despite the pad, I couldn't find really significant improvement in the heating issue. 3 fans were running at a pretty good speed under my laptop but they didn't seem to make much difference. I realized first thing, that I had to create some more gap between all the objects, laptop, pad and table. Once I had done that, I found a better improvement in the temperatures.
Before usage of the pad, my laptop with nothing running, just turned on was showing my 2 cores at temperatures between 55 and 65. With stuff running, it would quickly shoot up to the 80s and with a little more use, my system would become sluggish and show temps of nearly 100 and sometimes 101C.
Once I used the cooling pad effectively (with improved gaps), my laptop in idle state would show between 40 and 50C (some times 37C), and with stuff running anywhere between 60C and 80C depending on the load. And almost rarely it would enter the 90s. I noticed it would enter the 90s when my room as a whole isn't cool enough. My sad air conditioning struggles to keep my room at 30C. I feel it's quite a high room temperature to work and sleep in. In these conditions my laptop also shows the effect of a hot room. But in most cases, when I close all the programs putting the load on my processor, it quickly cools down to the 40s. That wouldn't happen earlier. So at least it shows upto a little extent that my $2 pad is actually working with some modifications and fixes.
Then I felt like experimenting more. So, being the Aerospace Engineer that I am, I did some crude some tests. I used an incense stick and placed it near the fans to see how the air was flowing and at what distance were the fans really effective. By looking at the smoke, blade design and the direction of rotation, I could tell that the pads were pushing air up onto the laptop. The smoke was so thin that it would just dissolve by the time it got accelerated before entering the fans. Not a really helpful test, but I'm sure the air in being blown on to the underside of the laptop. Despite my guess that the internal fan is sucking air into the laptop, I'm somehow more hopeful with the pad working in a reversed direction.
Instead of accumulating more volume of air between the pad and the laptop, I would prefer the pad continuously pushing air out toward the table which forces more air to come in between the pad and laptop. This way, there's a guarantee of fresh cool air coming in (even if the pad is pulling air that just came out of the bottom, the air would get cooled enough to be reused) and the internal fan doesn't have to work with stagnant warm air. I noticed that the air pushed out of the fan, comes out more at a very tight angle to the pad, and not much perpendicular to the fan. This means that it would be quite effective facing downwards. It would be pushing air out towards the table yet, not directly onto it.
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I guess, I'm thinking too far. But those were some of my observations and guesses. So now I've reversed pad. Another mod to the already modded pad. Surprisingly, it's even more silent. (earlier I used to hear a slight noise when the room was silent). Now, I can't tell if the fans are running even in a silent room. And the cooling seems to have improved. I need to do this a little longer to see if this is really true. Time will tell if this idea worked and saved my laptop from roasting up.
Obviously, heat was a major issue. The table is pretty old and most of the polish is gone so it feels like the table is not really helping in letting the heat from the laptop escape. I used a plastic object to try and create a little more gap between the laptop and the table so that the heat would escape with ease. But it was a bit uncomfortable to use the laptop so I discarded that idea. I looked online and found that people use cooling pads under their laptops to keep them cool.
At this point (a couple of months ago) I really started wondering what temperatures I'm really dealing with here. I downloaded a couple of apps like CoreTemp and SpeedFan. They seemed to suggest that my laptop was definitely heating a lot. There were times when the temperature shot up to nearly 100C when the TJMax was listed as 105C. It was a bit scary. Only once ever did my laptop actually shut down due to over heating. And there was one time when my screen went crazy and I got the blue screen. I assumed that was because of the heat as the laptop felt like it was quite literally on fire. And all this happened with just playing some videos or doing some graphic design work. I haven't played any games in the last 2 years. I just didn't want to allow over heating and shut down issues to repeat. I had some more issues later. A lot of times, the display just went blank. The screen seemed to turn off. I later discovered that when viewed at a certain sharp angle, I could faintly see what was on the screen. This meant that the screen was still showing but the backlight was gone. I could manage to shut the laptop down safely and get the screen back up on restart. I had to do something to fix this problem!
I went back to looking at cooling pads and found a really cheap one for just 2 bucks. I almost considered it just an experiment without investing too much money. So by spending 4 bucks in total, I was getting a laptop cooling pad with 3 fans shipped home. I read some reviews that it was extremely flimsy and wasn't useful anywhere but a flat table. Some actually reported it to be broken at arrival. The day that I got mine, I was shocked to know that there's a laptop cooling pad inside the box that arrived. I wouldn't have been surprised to see just a piece of paper and nothing else. It was extremely light, weighing just a few grams with the packaging. When I opened the box, my worst fears came true. The pad was cracked. It wasn't in 2 pieces but definitely cracked. At this point I thought, it's not even worth sending back. I might as well, just try to tape it up and experiment with it. After all, it cost me only $4.
The pad was definitely the flimsiest i've ever seen. If I had to move it, I would do it extreme care. It felt like even the slightest excessive force would break it into 2. Despite the pad, I couldn't find really significant improvement in the heating issue. 3 fans were running at a pretty good speed under my laptop but they didn't seem to make much difference. I realized first thing, that I had to create some more gap between all the objects, laptop, pad and table. Once I had done that, I found a better improvement in the temperatures.
Before usage of the pad, my laptop with nothing running, just turned on was showing my 2 cores at temperatures between 55 and 65. With stuff running, it would quickly shoot up to the 80s and with a little more use, my system would become sluggish and show temps of nearly 100 and sometimes 101C.
Once I used the cooling pad effectively (with improved gaps), my laptop in idle state would show between 40 and 50C (some times 37C), and with stuff running anywhere between 60C and 80C depending on the load. And almost rarely it would enter the 90s. I noticed it would enter the 90s when my room as a whole isn't cool enough. My sad air conditioning struggles to keep my room at 30C. I feel it's quite a high room temperature to work and sleep in. In these conditions my laptop also shows the effect of a hot room. But in most cases, when I close all the programs putting the load on my processor, it quickly cools down to the 40s. That wouldn't happen earlier. So at least it shows upto a little extent that my $2 pad is actually working with some modifications and fixes.
Then I felt like experimenting more. So, being the Aerospace Engineer that I am, I did some crude some tests. I used an incense stick and placed it near the fans to see how the air was flowing and at what distance were the fans really effective. By looking at the smoke, blade design and the direction of rotation, I could tell that the pads were pushing air up onto the laptop. The smoke was so thin that it would just dissolve by the time it got accelerated before entering the fans. Not a really helpful test, but I'm sure the air in being blown on to the underside of the laptop. Despite my guess that the internal fan is sucking air into the laptop, I'm somehow more hopeful with the pad working in a reversed direction.
Instead of accumulating more volume of air between the pad and the laptop, I would prefer the pad continuously pushing air out toward the table which forces more air to come in between the pad and laptop. This way, there's a guarantee of fresh cool air coming in (even if the pad is pulling air that just came out of the bottom, the air would get cooled enough to be reused) and the internal fan doesn't have to work with stagnant warm air. I noticed that the air pushed out of the fan, comes out more at a very tight angle to the pad, and not much perpendicular to the fan. This means that it would be quite effective facing downwards. It would be pushing air out towards the table yet, not directly onto it.
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