Are any of you aware of a worthy, active laptop cooler for my 17" HP? I find that its fan kicks on too often for my liking even though I have it on a hard surface.

Mo, possibly just placing it on a hard surface isn't adequate if the fan or inlets are on the bottom. I use my Dell(bottom fan)raised about 1" on foam packing support blocks.

the toshiba laptop I use at work is a real engineering marvel. The fans are on the bottom so it runs about 3 times louder than my desktop, which runs the battery down in about 30 mins even when the lid is closed. Its about 3 inches thick and weighs half a ton...

Then theres my powerbook G4 titanium that runs nearly silent except for the hard drive. It actually shuts down everything not needed when you close the lid and there are no intakes on the bottom of the thing. Whoda thunk it?! lol.

Dont know of any cooler mats. Just had to share my story.

Yes John I hear what you're saying. The surprising thing is that I purchased a cooling mat with dual fans for a total airflow of 28cfm earlier today and it has made nil difference. So now I am looking for the mother of all cooling mats .

Found it .

Mojo, check out Rain Designs. I got one of their stands/lap pads for my old Thinkpad T43, and now use it with my T61p. It's not active, but it certainly keeps my lap cool!

Ken,

Thanks. I've come to realize that I need ice under my laptop to keep it cool .

Well, at least this is an aluminum sheet and air. That would help!

What are you doing on the laptop? I only really get the fans kicking in on my T61p when I'm gaming. The T43 turned on its fans whenever it was plugged in...

And my old PowerBook just set my pants on fire.

I actually don't even put it on my lap. I have it on a hard table and now I've even got it elevated a couple of inches off the table to no avail.

For whatever reason, when I'm surfing the web, the fan comes on more than 50% of the time. I'm just worried that I'll end up reducing its lifetime.

The few times I have seen that, it is usually cause by too much dust in the cooling mechanism. One good shot of compressed air might do the trick.

Could be. But it's been doing it since day 1. Maybe it was dusty from the factory.

Wow! Yeah, could be, but the probability of that is much lower, I think. Is the laptop "off the shelf" or has it been modified in any ways?

I bought it from FutureShop. I talked with a few customers and staff in there yesterday and they told me all these higher speed HPs behave this way. Maybe they all have dust in them .

Probably just not the greatest cooling design.

So after some testing today, I've concluded that the fan activity is due to the wireless card. When I connect to my router via copper, the fan doesn't even come on when I'm surfing. Switch to wireless and it sounds like I've got a swarm of bugs in my laptop.

I've even tried knocking down the transmit power to minimum to no avail.

My ACPI is at 52 deg. C. HP says that's well within the design limits but they told me to download a new BIOS. Do I dare install it?

That sounds like a reasonable temperature. Probably wouldn't hurt anything to install the BIOS.

Fortunately, you don't know where I live.

:). I downloaded the BIOS and it was three months older so I didn't bother.

I'll bring this to your attention though.

I thought I'd update you all.

My laptop died earlier today. HP said that it's to be expected with that model because AMD processors run too hot and the fan is under-sized.

So tomorrow I go on the hunt for a new laptop that will fit my existing SATA hard drive : ) while mine gets repaired. I don't really want to go with another HP but I'm worried that there may be some incompatibility if I don't.

Bantha poodoo! AMD cpus havn't run hot for at least 4 years.

I wouldn't worry too much about the drive. It will run in any laptop.

Also, bantha poodoo, HP built the damn thing. Don't go blaming AMD for your poor design.

You will have problems just plugging your existing drive into a new laptop, even if is an HP. Very few drivers are universal. Best just to get a new laptop and an external SATA->USB case.

Ken,

Are you serious? If so, can I boot my machine from the external SATA->USB abomination? And what does that do to performance?

I have all of my data backed up. However, it took me 6 months to set up my laptop environment and I don't want to spend another 6 months recreating it. I was hoping I could just plug it into another machine.

I think he was implying that it would be easier to get a new laptop and boot from it's own HD and then access the data via the 'abomination'.

From your last post, that doesn't accomplish what you want to do, in that you want to boot from the old so everything is exactly as it was before. As mentioned, that might be a frustrating venture.

No harm if you try booting from the old hard drive. Worst case Ontario (As Ricky from Trailer Park Boys says) is that it won't boot or that it will boot up but be very flaky. If it's unusable, just swap the original back in and no harm done. Only caution = Maybe check to see if opening it up enough to swap hard drives voids your warranty.

Laptops tend to be much more proprietary than desktops. If it boots at all and the screen is viewable, you could struggle to replace all the drivers that need to changed, but honestly, I 'sometimes' know what I'm doing and I wouldn't bother to try to go that route. Very likely be too much of a PITA.

You are lucky enough to have your data backed up so you are better off than most.

Mojo,

I received a Gear Head Tri-Cool aluminum active notebook cooler pad, Model CF5000U, as a gift and it's great. My HP laptop always ran hot and the internal fan kicked in whenever I viewed videos, used the wireless card, etc.

The cooler pad is portable, USB-powered, and uses three fans that are quiet with adjustable fan speed. It keeps my laptop quite cool, and the hp's internal fan hardly ever comes on.

Regards,

Alan

Alan,

Thanks.

Is that an AMD or Intel-based laptop?

Mojo,

It's AMD-based, and like you, I was concerned that the heat factor was shortening its potential life. Before I received the notebook cooler, I'd put the laptop on a metal tray, which served as a heat sink and helped somewhat, but it was clumsy in my home office.

Alan

I just got a dual Intel HP today. I'll be swapping out the drive after jakewash and I get done with his SVS. I'll let you know how it goes.

You are so screwed...

You're going from an AMD chipset to an Intel chipset. Hope it boots, man.

Well, you're right. My old drive doesn't work in the new laptop.
HP however told me that it would work.

Now I am booting up with my new drive so that I can at least have a working laptop. I don't think I'll spend any time mojoing it for the time being.

Ken, did I pooch my old drive? Once I get my (hopefully repaired) laptop back from HP, it should just be plug-and-play, right?

HP is full of crap.

If it didn't install any drivers or anything, you should be ok (in other words, if it simply didn't boot at all). If it tried to install drivers, you may have screwed said pooch.

It didn't boot into Windows. It tried to do a recovery.

My new drive seems to be working in it now.

Yerk. We'll find out...

The fan on this one has more than two speeds .

It's fast! I can surf at light speed. After a week of use though, I'm sure it will get clogged down.

Why will it get clogged down? Most computers (unless you build it yourself) can be made to run faster and more efficiently by dumping a lot of the crap they come preloaded with and tweaking the settings. May or may not be able to do much with your surfing/downloading speeds. Just do a search for optimizing laptops or optimizing windows (version). Just make sure to create restore points before doing anything your not sure about.

Better yet don’t mess around and just install Linux.

Shoulda bought a Mac. They run Windows great.

I finally cleaned all the crap out of it including removing unused registry entries. Then I installed Vista Ultimate Upgrade so that I can get onto corporate LANs. The fan's a lot quieter on this one and so far, it's only doing one funny thing: my WAN is showing as disconnected in the taskbar (has an X through it) but it's running just fine.

I hate it when I have a disconnected WAN.

So, the saga continues.

I received a box from HP last Tuesday. It was too small and didn't have an insert for my battery and HP adaptor. I put in another call to HP and they said they'll send the right box out. So I called them today to find out where the box is and they told me that there is only one box and I have it. "But it won't close", "It has no insert for all the auxilliary stuff" and "Why didn't you let me know instead of making me wait for nothing" I say. To which she responds "Why don't you just find a bigger box?".

Lesson learned. Never buy an HP laptop.

Thanks for the info, Mojo. My boss keeps mentioning HP laptops, since we have HP servers and workstations.

I've not had great experiences with their workstation support, but server has been decent.

I dislike HP only because they are also Compaq, kinda. I have years of hating Compaq from my days doing retail software and PC support and Compaq was our 'high end' brand. So ridiculously proprietory, they were just a PITA to work with.

Life just won't let me forget because when I look at my work issued "HP" laptop, it has also has a Compaq logo on the top right hand side of the screen framing.

Just a little thing but it gives me the same feeling I get when I hear someones pager go off. Just reminds me of frustrating times.

Yeah, but the Proliants are fantastic as far as replacing parts go. The desktops (at least business) are a heck of a lot less proprietary now, although they totally rip you off on the video card. Seems par for the course, but $250 for an X1600 w/256MB? I didn't think they even made those any more.

And people say Apple's vid card prices are bad... (which they are.)

.............Update...........

I received my laptop back from HP following a system board replacement. I popped my drive back in and voila...everything works great!

BTW, the Intel-based HP has been rock solid. In the 4 weeks that I've been using it, I haven't experienced a single glitch. And it runs very quiet.

Right on! Glad to hear that it's working.