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We had a user at work who had a DellD830 that was really running slow. Took me a week to get her to run a antivirus scan and it found nothing. By that time from googling I'd found lots of info about their tendency to suck in dust and overheat and then throttle back the CPU. So I took a can of air and blew the thing out the best I could, I even used a bit of vacuum on it although I don't recommend it there's always the potential for static charge with that.
I even ordered her a laptop cooler a NotePal X-Slim. Her system is running quite a bit better now so she's not actually using the cooler yet.
But in the process of figuring all this out I downloaded a program called SpeedFan that is really interesting. It allows you to do realtime monitoring of your CPU temp, core temps etc, even supposed to track the CPU speed so if it gets hot and throttles back that's supposed to show(testing on mine so far that hasn't happened but mine's not nearly as hot as hers).
Mine started out reading 62-64 C and with some tweaking, closing programs etc by the end of the day yesterday I had it at 49 degrees without the cooler(I'd plugged that in earlier to test). When I came in this morning and logged in it was at 29 so you can see how cool they get in sleep mode and how warm they get otherwise.
Her latop was reading 72 C when I first downloaded SpeedFan! That's pretty high but apparently not nearly as high as they can get, most laptops have a shutdown where if the chip gets over a certain temp it shuts down to prevent damage. Most do that closer to but under 100C. From a little monitoring after my initial cleaning I realized hers spiked at 79C so that's when i went back in and really blew out the dust and used the vacuum. D830 is a major pain to clean you literally have to take off the CPU and the whole motherboard to get at the fan, it's a 25-40 minute process depending on how confident you are and I didn't want to do that so I did what I could to get the dust out without doing that.
After that thorough cleaning it dropped immediately to 61 and it's now running about 58. It varies depending on what she has open etc but it's running about 14-15 C cooler than before which is pretty significant. Unfortunately I hadn't figured out the "Exotics" part of the Speed Fan program yet so I didn't see her CPU speed before it cooled down. What seems to happen is the machine cools way down(hers got to 52) and then the CPU says ok I can throttle back up again, and then the temp goes back up too? Seemed to do that it cooled way down and then warmed back up and seems to have settled around 58. Speedfan says 50 is ideal, so I may wind up using the cooler on hers anyways but the speed of the computer is MUCH better.
FYI if you decide to use Speedfan be very careful when you download it. I got it off CNet and I did it on my work laptop first, it's quite sneaky it asks you to accept several things at least 3 of which are downloading addons like toolbards and adware(called Savin). I didn't pay attention the first time and then had to uninstall all that later. A cool program though you can really see what your computer is doing temp wise.
I also downloaded it at home on my new Dell Desktop, talk about a difference it's peaking at about 30C, you can really see the difference in how hot laptops actually run.
I even ordered her a laptop cooler a NotePal X-Slim. Her system is running quite a bit better now so she's not actually using the cooler yet.
But in the process of figuring all this out I downloaded a program called SpeedFan that is really interesting. It allows you to do realtime monitoring of your CPU temp, core temps etc, even supposed to track the CPU speed so if it gets hot and throttles back that's supposed to show(testing on mine so far that hasn't happened but mine's not nearly as hot as hers).
Mine started out reading 62-64 C and with some tweaking, closing programs etc by the end of the day yesterday I had it at 49 degrees without the cooler(I'd plugged that in earlier to test). When I came in this morning and logged in it was at 29 so you can see how cool they get in sleep mode and how warm they get otherwise.
Her latop was reading 72 C when I first downloaded SpeedFan! That's pretty high but apparently not nearly as high as they can get, most laptops have a shutdown where if the chip gets over a certain temp it shuts down to prevent damage. Most do that closer to but under 100C. From a little monitoring after my initial cleaning I realized hers spiked at 79C so that's when i went back in and really blew out the dust and used the vacuum. D830 is a major pain to clean you literally have to take off the CPU and the whole motherboard to get at the fan, it's a 25-40 minute process depending on how confident you are and I didn't want to do that so I did what I could to get the dust out without doing that.
After that thorough cleaning it dropped immediately to 61 and it's now running about 58. It varies depending on what she has open etc but it's running about 14-15 C cooler than before which is pretty significant. Unfortunately I hadn't figured out the "Exotics" part of the Speed Fan program yet so I didn't see her CPU speed before it cooled down. What seems to happen is the machine cools way down(hers got to 52) and then the CPU says ok I can throttle back up again, and then the temp goes back up too? Seemed to do that it cooled way down and then warmed back up and seems to have settled around 58. Speedfan says 50 is ideal, so I may wind up using the cooler on hers anyways but the speed of the computer is MUCH better.
FYI if you decide to use Speedfan be very careful when you download it. I got it off CNet and I did it on my work laptop first, it's quite sneaky it asks you to accept several things at least 3 of which are downloading addons like toolbards and adware(called Savin). I didn't pay attention the first time and then had to uninstall all that later. A cool program though you can really see what your computer is doing temp wise.
I also downloaded it at home on my new Dell Desktop, talk about a difference it's peaking at about 30C, you can really see the difference in how hot laptops actually run.
