Acer Travelmate 3201XCi: Heat and noise?

Ok, so I have dug through numerous post but still have a few questions.

The fan it kicks on when booting up but what does it do when just word processing and surfing the net. Gaming, I assume its always on. My friend has a 600m and I don't think that ever kicks on when word processing.

And for the two tasks above, word processing and gaming, how hot does it get. Thanks a ton.

 

I don't have the unit, but basically for Pentium M notebooks, the fans usually come on once every few mins for a few seconds. You can sometimes go for 10-20mins before the fan comes on, but it depends on what's running/what you're doing. It also depends on the Power Management settings, as the schemes will dictate how much cooling is provided (Battery Power, AC Power, etc...). Playing games will push the system a lot harder and therefore will be required to be on more often.

Regarding heat, I don't think it heats up too much. No one has mentioned excessive heat. The unit will get warm even when surfing or word processing, but should not get hot to the touch.

-Vb-

 

For the people that own this model, can anyone confirm that the fan doesn't usually kick on when running off the battery. Noise is a major concern for me becuase I will most likely be using this in class and don't want it to be too loud.

 

I own an acer tm3201 and I also use it for class. Believe me, it aint loud! I confirm that the fan does turn off and on, just like what venombite said. However, every laptop does this. As for excessive heat, its a lot cooler then the previous laptop i owned. (the heat isn't bad at all)

 

I don't think it's worth worrying about.. only time it may get a bit annoying is in a library where the surroundings are dead silent.

 

I have my CPU clocked at 600MHz most of the time. I did not hear the fan for several days. Also you might want to note, that the fan has two speeds. The low speed operation is pretty quite. The high speed gets pretty loud.

 

I don't know about the 3201, but I have some other reference points. I'm also concerned about noise and heat, so I was looking carefully at those issues while shopping around.

I have a friend with the Dell 600M (Pentium-M), and it has the quietest fan I've seen ( I didn't know it was on till I put my ear close ). After about 45 minutes of easy word processing, the fan was staying on constant, but barely audible.

The Acer TM292E (Celeron-M) runs very quiet. With word processing or web browsing, the fan never comes on. For gaming it stays on. On this model the palmrest stays relatively cool, probably partly due to the component placement. The CD drivebay is under the left palm, and the battery is under the right palm, so the processor, ram, and other heat-generators are all toward the back of the unit.

I also looked at an HP model with the Cel-M, and it appeared that the fan would stay off for word processing.

I looked at the Dell Inspiron-1000, but the fan cycled on for 15 seconds every 90 seconds, even when idle. Plus that fan was pretty loud.

A handy way to do quick-n-dirty fan evaluations in the store is to listen for the fan (or put your hand at the air exhaust if noisy store) while trying various tasks. To quickly load the cpu, open calculator (switch to scientific view) and compute 999999 factorial (n!). It will run as long as you want, and if you open the clock first, you can see how long till the fan comes on.
(another bad-but-handy benchmark is to compute 33333 n! It usually takes around 10 to 30 seconds on laptops in the price range I was looking at. Really only compares floating point performance, but fun to do anyway!)

 

Hi,

I've got an Acer Aspire 1200XV (celeron 1ghz - 128mb sdram - 10gb) running XP Pro and the only backrgound process is Norton A.V. (and soulseek sometimes [ ] )- the fan noise is immensely irritating... it kicks in maybe 3-4 minutes after booting - irrispective of what I'm doing even if I don't touch it! - and practically doesn't stop after that (maybe it stops for a minute or two after half an hour)... actually it gets worse the longer it's on!

My question:
1. Would downgrading to XP Home or even Win 98 (does win 98 support USB 2 though?) and buying some extra ram (an extra 256) solve this problem?
2. I know I may have done some damage since I practically never used it's batteries (it's always plugged in) - the battery now lasts maybe 3 minutes without a recharge - would buying a new batt. help?
3. Could it be just "old age". This machine must be around 4 years old now?

I'd like to keep this machine because it's specs are enough for what I need it for (mostly browsing/email and sometimes music software) but the noise is driving me up the wall.

Your opinions?

Thanks.