[granodemostasa]

since my soucre is my laptop and my laptop stands about two feet from my head i can really hear the hard drive and the fans going. any way to make it quieter?

My laptop is a Thinpad T42 2373-K1U
5 months old
14.1 inch screen
1.7GB Pentium M
2GB Ram, 2700/333mhz
40Gig Hard drive (dont' know the speed, probably 5400)

 

[Razoramus]

only thing i can think of is replacing the hard drive and fan with quieter ones

 

[Iron_Dreamer]

For the fan noise, I'd run a program called CHC (centrino hardware control), it allows you to underclock and undervolt your processor which can make the fan turn on much less. For instance, I was able to decrease the idle voltage of my system to 0.7V @800MHz (Pentium M 1.83GHz), and since the T42 uses the earlier revision Pentium M, you should be able to get to an even lower idle voltage, since it uses a 4x multiplier instead of 6x, so your idle speed will be lower. With this setup the fan only kicks in every 20-30 minutes for a few minutes. I also took apart the heatsink and reapplied it with arctic silver, but I would only recommend this if you are very intrepid, or desperate, or both. That reduced my temps by about 7C.

Hard drive noise, well CHC allows you to have the hard drive completely stop spinning when not in use, as well as have muted seek noise, if it can enable the power management mode. Otherwise I guess you'd need to swap drives. Do you have the 7200RPM drive in your T42? I have only a 4200RPM, and it is very quiet, though not silent, and the speed is not as bad as I'd feared, coming from a desktop rig with a 15000RPM boot drive.

 

[Tim D]

I undervolt my CPU with RMClock. Also use a dust blower on all your fan vents. Finally you can look for custom fan app's if you feel the BIOS fan settings are too aggressive (don't go overboard with that though).

 

[Sparky191]

Blow out all the dust.

Add more ram and use a ram disk where possible.

You can add one of those cooling stands that sit under the laptop and hep coool it better.

Whats the spec of the laptop?
what is it doing when its so noisy?
Why is 2 ft from your head? Move it?

 

[zutme]

You could try insulating with foam. Not a good idea thermally, but if your hard drive runs pretty cool you could try insulating it. I've done this before with success. Also you could install a pentiometer on the fan for your cpu to throttle it down. Again if you go too low heat will become a problem.

 

[Sparky191]

You've stuck foam in a laptop?

 

[zutme]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sparky191 You've stuck foam in a laptop?

Yeah in the area around the hard drive to dampen the noise. I wouldn't recommend doing this if you are at all worried about the drive overheating, but in this situation it was loud as hell and I knew the hdd ran pretty cool.

 

[granodemostasa]

How do i run the software? one of the things i'm concerned with is if it kills the performance. since i use it for note taking fast start ups are a must and several a week i run several large files and such. will it only do it if i'm not using all the computer's potential (ie, when i'm writing and listening to music)?
The heatsink thing is interesting, but i'm worried about voiding the warrantee. how risky is it?
foam.... i'll look into it.

 

[Iron_Dreamer]

Quote:

Originally Posted by granodemostasa How do i run the software? one of the things i'm concerned with is if it kills the performance. since i use it for note taking fast start ups are a must and several a week i run several large files and such. will it only do it if i'm not using all the computer's potential (ie, when i'm writing and listening to music)? The heatsink thing is interesting, but i'm worried about voiding the warrantee. how risky is it?

If you've never taken apart/built a desktop computer (let alone a laptop), I don't know if you should do the heatsink bit. It took long enough for me just to get into the guts of my laptop, and I build systems all the time. I would classify it as a pretty high risk operation.

The software is pretty simple, it runs at startup in the system tray, and is pretty much set it and forget it. It dynamically adjusts the processor speed depending on load, so that you don't suffer any performance hit. As soon as there is a demand for more cycles than the processor can give at the lower speed, it hikes up to the higher speed setting. It will not effect start-up since it only loads once windows is started (besides, startup times are mostly disk-access based anyway).

 

[Tim D]

Foam is a bad idea unless it is special material and applied in areas with the expertise of a thermal engineer since many types of foam will break down into little particles or dust over time. In addition, by restricting air flow you only increase heat which increases fan noise. Undervolting does not affect performance nor is it in effect on boot-up. It potentially affects stability, but only if you do not supply enough voltage. You can play around with settings and Prime95 to get the correct settings. Most Dothans for example can do .7 V completely stable at minimum clock rate. It is the voltage you supply under max clock that needs to really be tested and depends on the quality of your chip.

I personally wouldn't do heatsink unless you have *another* reason to crack open the laptop (i.e. a very thorough dust removal job or component replacement/repair). Paste's do their best performance near the beginning after it sets and can slowly degrade over time (depending on how it was applied and other conditions). The stock pads typically give very average performance but very consistently over time. Its worth it and easy on desktops where you want max performance, overclock, etc. Not to mention the fan/sink is usually much easier to remove. Laptop sinks are usually coupled by precision screws and you need to apply even pressure, etc (course you are at the mercy of the manufacturer wheter they mounted it perfectly as well...but if it was an automated process it probably was).

The undervolting tweak gives far more benefit than the thermal paste btw without needing to undo a single screw. I happen to prefer RMClock because the authors know their stuff (just look at the other apps under the rightmark group including RMAA). Doesn't use .NET framework (no offense against it as I develop apps in it myself, but for a small system utility I prefer the non memory hogging garbage collecting stuff). RMClock is not something you can just load up and use without research...and unfortunately I'm not sure the manuals are as complete as the software.

 

[Sparky191]

Personally all I needed to do with mine was blow out the dust with a air canister. Didn't need to anything else. Do that first before you go open it up.

 

[tokyofist]

undervolting with RMclock tutorial

also, i think the newer version of CHC is called notebook hardware control, although i don't know what was actually updated.

i use RMclock, but have been wanting to try out C/NHC.

 

[Way]

I have found the WD Scorpio an excellent hard drive(wd800ve).I still have yet to apply a firmware update to minimize a soft clicking from the drive.I am in no hurry and without a floppy drive.
I also use CHC with my t23 on max. battery and the fan rarely comes on.

 

[Chinchy]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Iron_Dreamer Do you have the 7200RPM drive in your T42? I have only a 4200RPM, and it is very quiet, though not silent, and the speed is not as bad as I'd feared, coming from a desktop rig with a 15000RPM boot drive.

Actually, the Hitachi Travelstar hard drives, at 7200 RPM are much quieter than the corresponding 4200 and 5400 RPM versions. At least that has been my experience thus far swapping out the hard drives on my trusty old T20.