Stay Frosty

I've been reading Tomshardware again.

"NOOOO!!!!" I hear you cry ? Well, it's actually a sensible article about something that could give us back some of the potential that gets baked out of our computer bits.

Here's the article - it's about a curious development in cooler technology.

This Acer laptop has been pretty good in its 2.5 years. It's stayed reliable, whereas the HP it replaced died in under a year (funnily enough - cause of death was cooler failure). It handles all I throw at it, which includes photo editing, iTunes streaming, web browsing, messenger, email and other stuff. It's my main Office type PC. However ... where it's started to struggle is video playback.

BBC iPlayer - seems fine actually :-)
Youtube up to 360p - is fine too
Youtube at 480p and above - works ok for a few minutes, then really struggles
(480p and other bigger numbers mean more pixels for a sharper image)
ITV and other streaming video - struggles

It's a reasonable spec laptop - Athlon II X2 M300 that is supposed to run at 2GHz. However, for battery saving and apparently heat limits, it'll cut itself back to 800MHz if it needs to. I'm not asking it to do much at the moment (Blogger's editor is quite cpu hungry) so it's not getting too warm.

Ok. So back to these revolutionary coolers.

Why Should We Care ?

The reason why this laptop struggles with higher res video is that it pushes the machine a bit too hard. More work for a PC means it gets hotter. My desktop runs cool but will go 25+ degrees C warmer when it's pushed hard. The internet video pushes this laptop so hard that I believe it's bouncing off its heat limits.

It slows itself down to avoid cooking itself. And the video playback goes choppy.

With the desktop, cooling isn't a problem. There's enough space in a desktop case to put a massive cooler in to keep it cool and quiet. I used the bigger version of this Zalman cooler at Novatech that just about fit in the box. You can't use anything like that in a laptop. Space is very tight and it needs cleverness to package everything in.

So if you can get a cooler in there that's way more efficient for its size, you can keep the machine cool enough to do what you want it to.

And that means we get our video playback as it was meant to be :-)

PS I'm back to wondering if I'll be playing cricket again this summer. Not cos of the weather - more the legs. My left leg was the bigger problem last year, that's ok. It's my right leg where the weak and leaky skin problem seems to be coming back. I suspect I need a Cone Of Shame !