godzilla23

My laptop makes a lot of noise. Most of the time it doesn't bother me, as I'm gaming or listening to music or whatever. But some of the time, it does get on my nerves. The sound, I know, is coming from the fans, that seem to always be spinning as fast as they can. I just want to be able to underclock my computer when I'm just on the internet or whatever, the times that I don't need the power my laptop has.

I've searched Google and found a program called SpeedSwitchXP but I'll admit that I don't really understand how it works or what it does.

If it helps, I'm running a Dell Inspiron 9100, P4 2.8G w/ HT, 1024 RAM, an ATI Mobile Radeon 9700... blah blah blah.

You know the one time I really noticed the fans was last week in a hotel room - I was taking advantage of the free high speed, and had my box set up on the table, nothing covering any of the fans, and it became very loud in a matter of minutes.

Any help is appreciated

froseph

Most laptop cpus dynamically change their clock speed depending on what you are doing and if you are plugged in or not. For example if you are just browsing the web the chip may be running on half speed, but if you are playing doom 3 then it will be running at full speed. The intel vesion of this is called "speed step". You can typically change these settings in the control panel power manageent to force it to run a more reduced speeds. Also i think HT increases cpu temps so you might want to disable that. HT does not always increase speed so you probably wont notice the difference. http://www.bay-wolf.com/speedstep.htm has some good information. SpeedswitchXP appears to be a manual way of changing the frequency of your cpu via Speed step which might be what you catually want to do.

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Rawb

I have a little Pentium III, and the first thing I install is the speedstep application. If you have it, it should show up in the taskbar as a little flag. Typically, I turn my laptop into only running in power-saving mode, because in order for that little fan to move any air it has to scream like a banshee.

Even with it turned down into low speed mode, it will frequently kick the fan on, typically I end up hanging the cpu part of the laptop off the edge of a table (wooden tables are pretty good insulators). My brother has a better solution for his, he lucked out one day and found an aluminum clipboard which dissapates(sp?) the heat quite nicely.

hrandani

Typically I find that when people complain about noise on laptops it's the hard drive, but it doesn't sound like you're complaining about a harsh grinding sound.

Aside from that, with the fans dynamically configured to cool down your chip and prevent overheating, if you are going to try to disable them or turn them down somehow you might want to look into those external fans they sell for laptops at frys, like a minidesk docking station. I've thought about buying one of those for when I play games on my laptop, because it seems to me that it gets entirely too hot when it's running at full bore for too long. I'd recommend you replacing the fans with something more efficient or quieter if this were a desktop, but laptops are very finicky about wiring, making that probably not a good idea.

As far as HT goes it is mostly a marketing gimmick and doesn't do anything, practically speaking.

Daniel_

My laptop has crappy airflow and a dodgy power lead that needs fixing (long wait for insurance company, blah blah blah), so I made myself a little jig from Lego - it raises the back edge up to let the air in, and gives some KB rake, as well as supporting the powerline to prevent arcing.

All I have to do now is hope my little girl doesn't realise I've stolen her Lego.

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asudevil83

i'm using Threadmaster.

it's alright.

you can set specific programs to use a certain percentage of the CPU. for example, right now i have it set so that no program uses more than 90% of the CPU at once, and have set it up so that Setiathome uses no more than 50% of the processor at a given time.