Help Heating Problems

[chocbrucemousse]

I have a Emachines (stop laughing, it was $1000) AMD XP 2400+ laptop. 512 ram, 40 gb hddisk, ... winXP home ed.. and when I play games that require processor power it overheats. I am trying to find a way around this... without cracking it open and swapping the heat sink and chip. I was wondering if there was some software that would let me limit the maximum total processor power.

What happens when an AMD processor overheats? Well, it just turns off the computer, as I have discovered time and time again. =( can anybody help me? I have a warranty on this computer, and the way i figure it, if i leave the system original, and show that it overheats, I will be able to have a large credit towards my next computer.

 

[dnuggett]

Lowering the processing power could be done by underclocking (if available) but lowering the proc's ability is going to affect your gaming quite a bit, maybe to unplayable levels.

 

[jschuk]

I doubt that it exists, but check first to see if Emachines included any sort of power management software. "Some" other manufacturers will let you slow down the CPU even when plugged in. XP by default has several different power modes like "always on", "presentation", and "max battery". I do not know if they affect the machine when plugged in, but if the manufacturer doesn't have their own power management software then you can use those settings to slow down/speed up the laptop while on battery. Again, I don't know if it will have any affect when plugged in, but you can try. The laptop most likely has a thermal protection circuit, well designed ones do, and is probably shutting down once the circuit trips. Also check with AMD to see if they have any power management software that you could use. Check with the manufacturer to make sure they haven't released any BIOS updates that may take care of shutdown issues. To show them that it overheats, you will have to let them look at the computer, and probably more than once.