Laptop overheating and fan noise

ogrim — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 11:00:41 +0000

My laptop have been somewhat dodgy the past 6 months. On occasions, it has overheated and died. The dying is caused by the CPU protecting itself from meltdown. In the old days there would be a burnt smell, and then you would swear. Even though I’m grateful the laptop doesn’t get bricked when overheated, I don’t really appreciate it dying on me. Sometimes it could die in a hot room, if it the CPU utilization was high enough. Not very handy.

Another problem have been the noise level it have produced, even by just browsing the web. It was making louder noise than my desktop PC, which got something like 8 fans in it. My laptop have 1. I had opened it earlier too look for dust, however it seemed perfectly clean. Yesterday, I figured I should try replacing the thermal paste. So I went ahead and opened it up again.

I stared dismantling the fan, with the easiest parts first: a piece of tape. Under the tape, I found this:

A thick layer of dust I had not noticed and blown out the first time I cleaned it. After removing the dust, I simply replaced the tape, closed the laptop and booted it up. No more loud noise, even under heavy load! The reason for the noise, was this compact layer of dust. The fan forced air trough the dust, resulting in a high pitched noise, and the fan working harder than it should. Now the air is flowing freely, and the bad sounds are gone. Happy times!

Major change, but you can’t see it

ogrim — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 23:54:49 +0000

I have upgraded to a regular install of WordPress 2.8.5 from an old, useless version of WordPress MU. The MU stands for multi-user, which I thought would save me a lot of time for hosting several blogs. Instead it led to frustration. Releases are lagging behind the official WordPress project, so I could not benefit from new features when a new version got released. There was also no tool to export the database, as I could import it in the first place. This was later solved by exporting the WordPress database in XML format.

WordPress MU had stored all the files and pictures I had uploaded in a special folder, nested deep within the directory tree. URL rewriting made this show up as /files, although it was much deeper than that. By simply extracting the folder and putting it in the root directory, I matched the previous URL rewriting, thus retaining all functionality for images and files. I had put off this upgrade for a long time, in fear of breaking something. After some testing on a local web server, I was confident everything would work out. I’m glad it did!

The minor change, you can see. It is the sidebar featuring tags, latest comments and soon hyperlinks.

Aleksander Skjæveland Larsen » rant

Laptop overheating and fan noise

Major change, but you can’t see it