Jeff7
Lifer
1- I just recently bought this thing on the forums, and it gets kind of toasty - the fan rarely comes on, and when it does run, it only does so for maybe 20 seconds if even that. Is there a place I can find a steady source of 5V inside the laptop, or maybe some way of changing the threshold at which the fan kicks in? What about the hard drive power pins? Do laptop drives use 5V?
*solved* 2- What is the maximum operating temperature for a laptop hard drive? The drive seems to have no cooling at all - no fans or anything resembing a heatsink near it. I'm defragmenting it, and the SMART reports that it is at 156F. When it's just spinning, it runs at around 138F. How hot can it get before a) it becomes a fire hazard, or b) it begins to nuke itself to death?
Solved with a laptop cooling pad; now the HD is at a tolerable, no longer painful-to-touch 130F.
3- Also, the BIOS is almost completely devoid of ANY kind of tweak or adjustments. Is there like a jumper inside to enable an advanced mode?
*solved*4- The cooler used a thick slab of a thermal pad to close the gap between the CPU core and the heatsink plate. I removed the cooler to get access to a screw that had come loose in shipping or something, and had lodged itself in the cooling fan. But anyway, the thermal pad is history. Would some thick "frag tape" do the trick? Or how about this: a thin piece of copper, as a part of a sandwich - CPU -> ASIII -> copper plate -> ASIII -> Heatsink thingy. I imagine that couldn't be any worse than the thick yellow stuff that was there.
I went ahead with the copper plate thing; it does an exceptional job - better than what was there. The entire laptop acts as a heatsink now. The sheet of metal that both secures the CPU and its cooling stuff in place, as well as insulates the motherboard from the keyboard, now also acts as a heatsink. The negative effect of this: the entire laptop gets warm before the built-in fan comes on, since the heat is being dissipated away from the CPU more effectively.
*figured out*5. I bought a stick of this RAM. The laptop will not POST fully with it in. If it's the only stick, no POST at all. If it's the second stick, with the 128MB stick of Kingston RAM in that came in it when I bought it, the RAM count completes normally, however it reports an offset error; Windows BSOD's on bootup then. What gives?
Not solved; just figured out. Intel hates high density RAM.
*solved*6. The battery is funky. It reads normal, but when it reaches about 80%, it then goes almost right to zero, Windows starts to shut down. I did the battery calibration (run the battery dead, recharge it) that Comcraq recommends, but it does nothing. Now it turns out, the battery is in fact not dead. When the system shut down from a "dead battery", I plugged it in, turned it on, and pulled the plug. It booted to Windows; I restarted it then - and it booted to Windows again; I repeated this, same thing. So the battery is NOT dead - Windows just thinks it is. It's been on, in the BIOS screen, for about a half hour now, with the battery light flashing. But it's still running! Is my battery just suicidal, and so it wants to be dead?
Solved: Drained it completely, by using Memtest86, which ran for about an hour and a half on what Windows said was a "dead battery" - and then allowed it to recharge fully.
Oh, the CPU in this is an Intel 600MHz P3 Speedstep. The stinkin' thing downclocks to 500MHz on battery power, which is just a little bit too little to decode a 12Mbit/s MPEG2 file in realtime. It needs that extra 100MHz.🙁
*solved* 2- What is the maximum operating temperature for a laptop hard drive? The drive seems to have no cooling at all - no fans or anything resembing a heatsink near it. I'm defragmenting it, and the SMART reports that it is at 156F. When it's just spinning, it runs at around 138F. How hot can it get before a) it becomes a fire hazard, or b) it begins to nuke itself to death?
Solved with a laptop cooling pad; now the HD is at a tolerable, no longer painful-to-touch 130F.
3- Also, the BIOS is almost completely devoid of ANY kind of tweak or adjustments. Is there like a jumper inside to enable an advanced mode?
*solved*4- The cooler used a thick slab of a thermal pad to close the gap between the CPU core and the heatsink plate. I removed the cooler to get access to a screw that had come loose in shipping or something, and had lodged itself in the cooling fan. But anyway, the thermal pad is history. Would some thick "frag tape" do the trick? Or how about this: a thin piece of copper, as a part of a sandwich - CPU -> ASIII -> copper plate -> ASIII -> Heatsink thingy. I imagine that couldn't be any worse than the thick yellow stuff that was there.
I went ahead with the copper plate thing; it does an exceptional job - better than what was there. The entire laptop acts as a heatsink now. The sheet of metal that both secures the CPU and its cooling stuff in place, as well as insulates the motherboard from the keyboard, now also acts as a heatsink. The negative effect of this: the entire laptop gets warm before the built-in fan comes on, since the heat is being dissipated away from the CPU more effectively.
*figured out*5. I bought a stick of this RAM. The laptop will not POST fully with it in. If it's the only stick, no POST at all. If it's the second stick, with the 128MB stick of Kingston RAM in that came in it when I bought it, the RAM count completes normally, however it reports an offset error; Windows BSOD's on bootup then. What gives?
Not solved; just figured out. Intel hates high density RAM.
*solved*6. The battery is funky. It reads normal, but when it reaches about 80%, it then goes almost right to zero, Windows starts to shut down. I did the battery calibration (run the battery dead, recharge it) that Comcraq recommends, but it does nothing. Now it turns out, the battery is in fact not dead. When the system shut down from a "dead battery", I plugged it in, turned it on, and pulled the plug. It booted to Windows; I restarted it then - and it booted to Windows again; I repeated this, same thing. So the battery is NOT dead - Windows just thinks it is. It's been on, in the BIOS screen, for about a half hour now, with the battery light flashing. But it's still running! Is my battery just suicidal, and so it wants to be dead?
Solved: Drained it completely, by using Memtest86, which ran for about an hour and a half on what Windows said was a "dead battery" - and then allowed it to recharge fully.
Oh, the CPU in this is an Intel 600MHz P3 Speedstep. The stinkin' thing downclocks to 500MHz on battery power, which is just a little bit too little to decode a 12Mbit/s MPEG2 file in realtime. It needs that extra 100MHz.🙁
