Computer power usage

Have you looked on the HP website to see if there is a fix, or any mention of this problem for your particular model ?

Peter

PS: Vista is worth avoiding, most of the machines that we have aren't up to running it anyway.

-- Peter & Rita Forbes Email: snipped-for-privacy@easynet.co.uk

I also noticed that some suppliers are shipping laptops/PCs with XP as Vista seams to be unpopular. I would think that XP is a better optoin.

Chris.

Well I have proven that it's the cooling fan now. Hooked up a bigger one to blow through the machine and it's working fine now. So I'll drop the old hard disk back in and see what happens now :)

THEN I need to see if there is a more practical internal fix ;)

Don't know if this will help your particular machine, but I have used this fan control utility for several years on my Dell Precision M60 laptop and can highly recommend it. Controls fan speeds and switch on/off points, and displays CPU & GPU temperatures and loads.

Peter

Lester Hi, I'm not sure which is the bigger thief of one's time "favours for friends" or the personal determination to "fix something simple" that takes over once you have started. I'm guilty of both so can't offer a solution there.

I have played with many laptops and find them frustrating and annoying. The problem is usually simple, the fix extremely difficult. Getting the parts is almost impossible unless it is one of the longer production runs or one of the many "badged" generic models about. While Peter's fan control programme is great if the fan is basically sound the problem I have found to be extremely common is that the fan/ heatsink/pipe assembly can get blocked with dust and fluff very easily and merely needs a good clean out. Don't get me wrong I didn't say an "easy" clean out. I have had success with taking a couple apart and giving everything a good clean and sometimes a drop of very light oil on the fan bearings. I always return with a stern warning about operating the laptop on anything else than a clean solid surface but students particularly seem to think that they work best balanced on their lap and complain bitterly about how hot they get - I wonder why?

I guess my success rate is only about 50-50 and if it is a paying job just don't bother; fixing laptops is not the way to a fortune or even a basic living. With regard to spares Google will find plenty of laptop spares shops but they usually provide parts from broken machines and yours may be a bit new to be easily available. They are worth looking round though as one will specialise in your machine manufacturer, although as you will well know not always who it says on the badge. There are a couple of US parts suppliers that list everything and a CPU fan/heatsink will be about $20-35 if they are available - worth a try if a good clean out doesn't work. It is also worth trying the original parts supplier if you can identify the manufacturer once you have the bits in your hand (the difficult part) particularly if like yours it is fairly new.

Nowadays I try a really good vacuum cleaner "adapted" to the fan intake grill as a start and often find a large lump of fluff appears at the grill. Secondly if a big favour then I will take the thing apart and do a proper clean out of the cooling system - never just a fan these days but some pipework and a heatsink thingy that does a really good job trapping fluff and dust. The external cooling aids will work for a little while if the user can accept the limitation to use but I have always found a strip down is the only real answer and even then will only last as long as it take sot fill with crap again. It's a good job that new (basic) laptops are now in the =A3300 bracket but they still suffer from the bespoke parts issue and relatively small production runs. It is one area where the pc manufactures have succeeded in getting the buyers to accept the "throw away" philosophy. Luckily the desktop makers have been force to build most machines from generic parts - much easier to fix or update.

Lester, sorry for stating the obvious to someone like yourself but I thought this was a good question that many would be interested in understanding what buying a laptop brings with it. It is the only situation where I recommend people to buy additional breakdown cover and although I build and repair computers for a (I almost said paying but more of a contributing) hobby I have just paid for three year cover for my daughters new Sony laptop. Hope you are successful.

Keith

Surely the user is not at fault for using a LAPTOP on TOP of their LAP?! It is more like the manufacturers fault for building a machine that will not function in the way that the name implies it will.

Hi Peter,

I use a Precision M70 at the moment, so I'm interested in this. Why doesn't the in-built thermal control work properly, or what would I gain from using this one instead? I haven't had any issues, and it has been left running for up to 24hrs.

Regards Kevin

Hi Kevin

The normal fan switch-on temperature on th M60 is set pretty high (can't remember exactly, but some stupid high point), and as a result it only seemed to come on after everything got too hot , and then slowed things to a crawl while the processor etc cooled down.

This was a real pain when doing large CAD assemblies as I'm sure you know, so when I found this little free utility it was a blessing.

Obviously the fan comes on a lot more often now this is installed, but

3 1/2 years on has kept things running well, if occasionally a little noisy when it ramps it up to full speed.

You can select the temperatures for 4 levels of fan speed, and 4 different profiles from meeting/office/games/normal, and it also displays the CPU temp in the lower r/h toolbar.

The speedswitch XP utility from the same guy is useful too.

Peter

Does not Windows have some nonsense about complaining if certain components are changed? Something to do with not installing on multiple machines?

Might be worth querying a Gates' World FAQ site?

MH

Hit that one every time I replace a hard disk or motherboard. M$ keep insisting that I need a new licence, but it's the *SAME* machine so the *EXISTING* licence is still legal. After a repair job, the machine will not allow you to update or authenticate via the internet. So you switch to the phone - run through the manual activate until you get told that you are a pirate - *THEN* when you ring back again you can get at an operator who will sort you out.

Why waste the time. They never listen :( I'm expecting even more fun with Vista, but perhaps we can convince M$ that

*REPAIRING* a computer does not make you a pirate and get them to provide a *SIMPLE* phone number for activating a repaired machine !!!!

And the laptop is working fine with a fan bolted on the bottom :) I wiped the old hard disk and rebuilt it and it seems to be OK *AND* I did not have a problem activating windows which *IS* a first :)

Surely if you have the original CD, it is just a matter of running install again?

Never had that one yet, but we do have half a dozen legit Win2kPro installation packs to use.

Peter

-- Peter A Forbes Prepair Ltd, Rushden, UK snipped-for-privacy@easynet.co.uk

'Product activation' - on XP this generates a security key based on the hardware, once that key is activated against the serial number you can't change any key hardware. So installing again on a new hard disk gives trouble. ADD to that the fact that the serial number may be locked to a particular installation CD - which the customer may not even have been supplied with - and you then have even more fun :(

No problem with W2k - in fact I keep dropping back to that if the XP key will not work!

Many laptop manufactures do not provide instalation CDs. There may be in system partition on the hard disk which allows you to re-instate the OS if it becomes corrupt but if you need to replace the hard disk, you are fcuked. Some laptops manufactures expect the end user to create their own recovery cds from tools installed on the machine. I wonder how many users actually do this?

XP cd keys. Before (re-)installing you need the correct type of media for the Key you have. There are three types of XP CDs- OEM, Retail Box and Volume license and each type can be - original without any service pack, with SP1, with SP2. A key for an OEM SP1 cd will be rejected if trying to install from an OEM SP2 CD.

The other thing worth remembering is that OEM manufactures do not use the serial number from the label stuck to the PC. Each manufacturer has a generic pre-activated set of serial numbers which they use for there machines. If you reinstall from a recovery cd provided by the manufacturer, the serial number may be "slipsteamed" in the cd so you don't need to enter it. If you reinstall using the serial number from the label, it will need to be activated andmay fail the automatic process so you need to phone MS. I found a partial list on the net once of these serial numbers for some common OEM manufactures e.g. Dell and HP

Since there are all these potential issues with serial numbers and product activation, Microsoft provide the means to reactivate a system even if it means phoning them up and I have never had a problem phoning them. My guess is that MS reccon that phoning them up will scare off most pirates that they don't ask too many questions and just give you the code to activate you OS. If you phone up every day trying to activate the same serial number then maybe they will get suspicious.

Archie

I remember when we got four Digital laptop computers with Windows95 pre-installed. I, as the systems administrator, religiously used the provided utility to re-create the media just-in-case. 22 floppies per laptop :-(

Mark Rand RTFM

When I were a lad, the OS (CP/M) used to fit on a single 128Kb 8" floppy disk. :-)

Archie

When I were a lad there weren't any floppy discs - you had to load the OS from paper tape (having first punched the program onto the paper tape with a blunt needle of course) ;-)

regards, Tony

Crikey!

We'll be down to the stone tablet with hieroglyphics at this rate..... Peter

-- Peter A Forbes Prepair Ltd, Rushden, UK snipped-for-privacy@easynet.co.uk

Windows95

rate.....

Well it was Holerith cards for me. Took ages to punch a program, and woe betide you if you dropped the bundle that was your program, as they didn't have sequential numbering (dahik !)

AWEM

I still have the floppy disk copy of the Windows for Workgroups development kit - 60 odd? (but I would not let any children look at it - the language used for some comments would even get censored today)

I can remember trundling over to Guildford Collage with stacks of 'mark sense' cards. Black pencil marks for each hole to be punched! Usually two or three round trips to get a working set of cards :( Guildford had an ICL1900 with 16kb words of core store - 16bit I think so switching back to 8 bit processors was another backwards step.

( So we are nearly back to stone tables Peter :) )