Heating Up The Inspiron 1420: Tests, Results, and Tips

Why would someone want to put the strain on their laptop and cause it to heat up? To provide other users of how hot their laptop could possibly run and what to do about it. Heat kills laptops, period. Unnecessary strain on your CPU can increase the temperature it runs at and cause negative effects. It is in your best interest to adjust your laptop to run as cool as possible and provide you a more comfortable rest on your lap rather than a hot tamale. Below I will provide the information I found on my testing and some things to do cool down your lap warmer.

* NOTE * I’m not computer tech guru or whiz when it comes to things. I’m sure there are other ways to test this and such, if anyone else is willing to conduct tests on their system and post their results I welcome all to add their findings here and knowledge dealing with the task at hand. I also do not advise the everyday user to do stress testing on their laptop as it creates a massive amount of unnecessary heat and could be detrimental to your system. I do this to provide information and knowledge to help laptop owners understand the effects of heat and how to get the most out of their new laptop, all to the best of my knowledge. Also, other factors such as your graphics card, hdd, cd drive, etc can create a good amount of heat. For all intensive purposes I am just monitoring CPU temps.

To start off I should explain how I am doing my testing so it makes sense to those of you reading this. It is a test of running Prime95 (for a 15 minute period) to maximize the strain on the processor while monitoring temperature changes using CPUID’s Hardware Monitor.

More information on Prime95 and how it works can be found here.

CPUID’s Hardware Monitor information and program can be found here.

Configuration of a few things play a key part in this test which could vary for other users with different setups. Off the top of my head I can think of (with my settings for this test beside)…

Processor Type : Intel Pentium Dual Core T2370 – 1.73GHz @ 1.063V (at min. load)

Battery Plan Settings : Processor Power Management -> Min / Max Processor State
Mine : 100% Min / 100% Max (Preset Maximum Performance Battery Setting – Plugged In)

Temperature of space you are using laptop in : 53 degrees F

Applications running : Only necessary windows files and Prime95

* I have basically an “out of the box” configuration setup as it comes directly from Dell aside from doing basic vista tweaking to turn off unneeded / unwanted services and background applications.

To start off I had currently been using my laptop so I shut it down for 30 minutes to let it cool off a bit. I immediately opened the Hardware Monitor utility upon entering windows so it would log the minimum temperature upon a cold boot status.



To find out just exactly how hot we can get the CPU up to I chose the In-place large FFT’s option in Prime95 to run which, according to the program, will output max heat and power consumption.



I started the torture test on the system and opened the Reliability and Performance Monitor utility embedded in windows to ensure the CPU was being utilized to its full potential while the test ran.



This is what the temperatures looked like after running Prime95 for just 3 minutes:



For the duration of the test the temps on the CPU ranged from 141-152 degrees. With a max of 170 degrees that is an 88 degree jump in just 3 minutes. It is easy to see that jumping right into a CPU intensive application or program can raise temperatures to unhealthy levels fast, even from a cold boot. Granted this program I am running is intended to maximize loads on the CPU for testing purposes, gaming and other applications or multi-tasking can have the same effects. So now that we have seen how much heat this bad boy is possible of, how the heck do we avoid burning our hard earned money?

For starters many things make heat in your computer. Your CPU being one of the major components in this. The graphics card is also a component that produces a lot of heat, especially when under the demands of new age games. Your HDD spinning for prolonged periods of time can produce extra heat. Even plugging in your laptop to charge the battery creates excess heat. Memory, CD/DVD drives, and a few other components also contribute to this ongoing battle. A few tips I can provide to help “beat the heat” are as follows:

1. Adjust your battery plan to incorporate your laptop usage needs. If you don’t need the processor to be working at 100% of its capacity all the time, set the minimum to 5%.

2. Avoid multitasking or using to many programs at once on your system. If you are listening to music, encoding video files, and playing Call of Duty 4 all at the same time, it is putting a massive strain on your processor. Try to limit how much you do at once if at all possible.

3. Tweak vista to ensure you do not have a boatload of unneeded services or programs running on your computer all the time. Information on this can be found here.

4. Avoid using your laptop in an area that is extremely hot. If your surrounding temperature is high, it’s not going to help the cooling of your laptop at all.

5. Do not block the airflow of the fans on the side/bottom of your laptop. You’ll trap heat inside your computer which is bad juju. If at all possible you could get some small feet to place under your computer to give it room to breathe or invest in a laptop cooling pad with fans built in to it to help gain better airflow.

6. Also another method I have read about is what is known as undervolting your CPU. Although I have not tried it on my Dell laptop (or know if it is possible to configure and work on the Dells). This involves using a utility to configure how much power your processor consumes and adjusting it to the bare minimum needed to remain stable. If you are one who doesn’t need the full 100% demand of the processor you could get away with using a general setting at a lower power consumption (sort of like underclocking) to help decrease CPU temperatures. Information on this can be found here & here.

7. Don't leave CD/DVD's in your drive if you don't need them. Everytime you open your Computer or anything that lists a your computers drives, it will read from the drive to retrieve information from the disk and cause more heat and unneed use of components.

I hope this helps a few people out by providing an understanding of how fast a processor can get so hot and a few ways to help cool it down to hopefully extend the life of your computer in the long run. Again if anyone has any “beat the heat” tips or tricks or information to add please feel free to post. Remember: Cooler laptops are happier laptops. Oh and if you found this at all helpful or interesting please throw me a few rep, I am new on here and plan on providing many more test scenarios and guides here in the near future.

(Also, I have limited internet access where I am right now and had to upload my pictures to my cardomain account as picture uploading sites have been blocked onboard this US Navy ship, sorry if it is an inconvinience to anyone.)

- Gater

 

This is definitely something I need to try out. I have an e1705, and I recently bought a 150 W AC adapter (I don't use batteries - it's a gaming machine) because I stuck a 512 mb card in there, as opposed to the stock 256 mb card. It used to run on a 90 W adapter, but I read that a 512 mb card needs a 130 W adapter minimum, so that's why I bought. So I go and buy a "130 W" adapter off eBay, I plug it in, boot up, check my BIOS, and apparently it's rated for 150 W...I don't want to fry my motherboard/CPU, so this undervolting should be good to try. I just don't know how I'm going to do it for testing on my gaming performance. The process will be TWICE as long for me, haha.

 

excellent post and excellent advice on why you should not let your laptop overheat