13 Feb 2012 etbe   » (Master)

Cooling a Thinkpad

Late last year I wrote about the way that modern laptops suck [1]. One of the problems that inspired that post was the excessive heat generated by my Thinkpad T61.

There is a partial solution to this, Fool Control explains how the kernel option pcie_aspm=force can be used on kernels from 2.6.38 onwards to solve a heat regression problem [2]. I applied this to my Thinkpad T61 and the result was that on a cool evening (ambient temperature about 24C) the temperature changed from 85C to 66C on the NVidia video card, and for the “virtual devices” it changed from 80C and 78C to 60C and 61C. I’m not sure exactly what each of those measurements refers to, but it seems that the change was somewhere between 17C and 20C.

This changes the system from being almost unbearable to use to being merely annoyingly warm.

I’m not going to make my laptop be my primary computing device again though, the combination of a desktop system with a 27″ monitor and an Android phone is working quite well for me [3]. But I haven’t yet got version control systems working for all my software. Also Wouter suggested using NBD which is something I haven’t got working yet and probably won’t until I can swap on it and therefore have a diskless workstation. Finally I still haven’t got the “Chrome to Phone” browser extension working such that a page I’m viewing at home can be loaded on my phone.

Related posts:

  1. Taking my Thinkpad Apart and Cooling Problems I’ve been having some cooling problems with my Thinkpad recently....
  2. thinkpad back from repair On Tuesday my Thinkpad was taken for service to fix...
  3. I Just Bought a new Thinkpad and the Lenovo Web Site Sucks I’ve just bought a Thinkpad T61 at auction for $AU796....

Syndicated 2012-02-13 04:14:06 from etbe - Russell Coker

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