MakeUseOf » temperature

3 Laptop Computer Temperature Monitor Apps That Could Save Your Hard Drive

Taty — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 22:30:26 +0000

As computers have become such a big part of our everyday lives, we have grown to expect faster and faster desktops and laptops for our daily activities. One of the problems with those fast processors and hard drives is that since they have to fit more power into increasingly smaller spaces, they end up reaching very high temperatures — which if not monitored and kept under control, can play havoc with your computer.

Overheating is one of the leading causes of hard drive failure. Other symptoms such as slowness, unresponsive programs and crashes and random reboots can sometimes be attributed to overheating as well.

When a processor fails, it is an expensive repair. However, when a hard drive fails, the costs of losing your data can be much, much higher. So what can you do to protect your laptop? Here are a few tools that could help you.

Real Temp

Real Temp is a comprehensive desktop or laptop computer temperature monitor that reads temperature information from all Intel Core processors and even allows you to calibrate the sensors for each individual CPU in dual- or quad-processor machines. And unlike many other sensors, it works equally well on laptops and desktops. Real Temp runs without installation being necessary. It can just be extracted to a folder or external drive and run directly from those places.

It comes preset with default max temperatures for each configuration, which can be easily adjusted; and also with an option for an alarm to go off if the temperature reaches dangerous levels.

Core Temp

Core Temp is one of the sensors that encompasses most of Intel’s and AMD’s CPUs, and it works on Windows XP Service Pack 2, 2003 Server, Vista and Windows 7 (both 32-bit and 64-bit versions). One of the useful tools includes the ability to log your information, which is very helpful when analyzing the temperature of the laptop over long periods of time and detect whether some fluctuations are normal or a sign of trouble.

SpeedFan

SpeedFan is a lightweight and reliable temperature monitor, which has the added bonus of also monitoring (as the name suggests) the speed of the fans, since they are an important part of the health of your computer.

It can be set to monitor your hard drive’s temperature, the CPU temperature and the general internal temperature of the computer. SpeedFan is an interesting program that allows you to do a lot but it doesn’t work on every laptop model due to the fact that the fans on every laptop are configured differently. In some models, the temperature is available but most other functions are not. In spite of that, it does serve as a reliable monitor for the internal temperature of the computer even when some of the other features are not available; and a good detection system to warn you when certain problems arise. It can be set to run on startup and sound an alarm if the temperature gets too high.

There are many computer issues that are difficult to diagnose and correct, but thankfully, high temperatures isn’t one of them. It should be one of the things to check if you start experiencing sluggishness and hard drive errors. All it takes is a little bit of attention and one of the programs above, and the problem can be corrected before it becomes an issue.

Have you experienced overheating? What kind of symptoms did you experience? How did you fix it? Let us know by writing a comment below.

Geeks Weigh In: Does Cooling The CPU In Laptops Make a Difference?

Ryan Dube — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 19:31:23 +0000

Today, with the massive popularity of mobile computing, many people find themselves using laptops in locations and conditions that they might never have considered before. With more powerful Wi-Fi technologies, people can sit out on the deck on a warm summer day to cruise the net or chat on Facebook. With higher speed capabilities over cellular data networks, people can sit on a boat in the middle of a lake and shop on eBay or Amazon. This is the amazing world in which we live – but with convenience comes complications.

Once, while we were sitting on the beach at camp using our laptops, my wife turned to me and asked, “Does it hurt the computer for it to warm up a little bit in the sun?” My knee-jerk reaction was to say that it doesn’t make a bit of difference. Then, a few memories from some of my engineering college classes came back and I remembered that as temperature rises, electrical conductance drops and components can degrade more quickly than normal. The real question is how much do those laptop cooling pads that you can place under your laptop for cooling the CPU really help?

Today, I’m going to take a scientific look at that question and see if we can’t quantify the answer – something you can point to any time any of your friends ask you whether or not cooling the CPU really matters.

The Method & The Measurement Tools

There are two variables to measure here – CPU temperature and cooling power. The experiment that I’m going to do in order to check for the correlation between those two variables is to benchmark the temperature profile of my Sony Vaio during normal operating conditions in my living room. Then I’m going to attempt to lower the core temperature of my laptop by using a USB powered cooling fan for 5 minutes and then for 10 minutes, and take additional benchmarks.

Choosing the measurement tool was easy – I just turned to my trusted source for free software, MakeUseOf! The best application for this purpose is SpeedFan to measure temperature (reviewed earlier by Kyle). First, to take a baseline of the normal operating levels of my CPU temperature, I’m going to take a snapshot of all temperatures as well as a graphical snapshop of the core temperatures. First, SpeedFan displays my current CPU temperature as shown here.

As you can see, the temperature of my Duo Intel Core processor averages about 36 degrees Celsius (96.8 degrees F). Next, I switched to SpeedFan’s charting feature for a short history of the core temperature range.

The core temperature range is from 35 to 37 degrees F, and this is with seven windows open, including an online radio stream. I’m going to see if I can increase my core temperature at all by opening up a YouTube video stream, Microsoft Word and a few additional Internet browsers.

By opening multiple windows and Internet streams, you can see that my core temperature has gone up a few degrees to about 39 degrees F. As you can imagine, some people open a large number of applications and windows without realizing the effect that doing so has on the work required from the processor and the resulting temperature increase for that component.

Experiment #1 – Cool Laptop For 5 Minutes

In this first test, I’m going to cool the laptop itself (and in effect the core temperature as well) of the laptop for a total of 5 minutes. For cooling the CPU, I’m using a USB powered notebook cooler pad rated with an air flow of 28 CFM and dual fan speed of 1500 rpm. Hypothetically, this should obviously cool the CPU even though the demands of multiple applications have driven the core temperature up. Let’s give it a shot – I’ll see you back here in 5 minutes.

Whew…okay that wasn’t too bad. The laptop doesn’t feel a lot cooler, but let’s take a look if I’ve chilled the Intel Duo Core at all.

Sure enough, five minutes using the cooling fan pad dropped the core temperatures from almost 40 degrees Celsius down to just over 37 degrees Celsius. While this is only a 3 degree drop in the core temperature, such a differential can really make a difference in the life of the processor.

Ideally, I’d like to see the fan bring the processor temperatures down to normal operating temperatures even with the additional applications open, but even after 10 minutes of cooling you can see that it just isn’t possible (at least not with this particular cooler).

It appears that while cooling the CPU of a laptop using these cooling fans certainly does make a difference, the cooling ability is limited by the device itself such as the airflow and fan speed.

Experiment #2: Cool Laptop Under Normal Operations

Motivated by the very clear results from the experiment above, I wanted to see how much cooling the fan under my original “normal” use conditions would help with CPU temperature. Once I closed down the YouTube video stream, the extra browser windows and the Microsoft Word app, I applied cooling for another 10 minutes and then checked the core temp history using SpeedFan again.

In this case, the ability of the cooling fan to cool the CPU was even more dramatic. While I was originally operating just under 37 degrees Celsius, using the cooling pad dropped my normal core temperature all the way down to almost 32 degrees Celsius – a significant 5 degree drop in core temperature. Given that any increase in temperature can shorten the life of electrical components over the long term, this 5 degree drop could have a very positive cumulative effect on the life of your laptop CPU.

The conclusion from my own testing is that yes, cooling the CPU in laptops does make a difference. Now it’s your turn – what do you think, do you think using a laptop cooling pad makes any difference in the life of your laptop? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

GKrellM – System Monitor Tool with Tons of Great Plugins

Damien Oh — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 12:30:45 +0000

GkrellM is not a new app. In fact, it have been around for a long time, even before Conky has existed. Despite its old age, it is still a powerful app that is used and loved by many people.

Simply said, GKrellM is a single process stack of system monitors that allows you to monitor your system resources easily and quickly. Apart from monitoring your computer’s status it comes with lots of plugins bringing lots of useful featureslike radio tuner, weather lookup, reminder etc.

In case you are wondering why is it called such a wierd name, the word GkrellM is actually make up of three words G-Krell-M. The G stands for GNU (some call it GTK) while the word Krell is an inspiration from the flim “Forbidden Planet” (the native in the show is called Krell). The M stands for Monitor.

When you install GKrellM, it comes with a default set of monitors, including

Hostname/system name display.
Clock/calendar.
SMP CPU monitor that can chart individual CPUs and/or a composite CPU.
Temperature, fan, and voltage sensor monitors
Process monitor with a chart for load and forks and a display of number of current processes and users.
Disk monitor that can chart individual disks or a composite disk.
Internet monitor (http, ftp, …) that displays current TCP port connections and charts historical port hits for over two days.
Net interface monitors with charts for all routed net interfaces.
Memory and swap space usage meters, and a swap page in/out chart.
File system meters which show capacity/free space.
A mailbox monitor which can launch a mail reader, a mail fetch/check program, and a sound notify command.
APM laptop battery meter with a configurable alarm and warning for low battery time left.
Uptime display.

Configuration

Configuring GkrellM is as easy as scrolling through the options menu and checking the boxes of the options you want.

On your Gkrellm window, right click your mouse and select Configuration (alternatively, press F1 on the keyboard). This will bring up the configuration window.

In the General option, under the Properties tab, this is where you can configure Gkrellm to be on sticky mode (always show on desktop) and/or get it to dock to the panel so that it won’t show up as an active window in the window list.

The configuration window also allows you to change settings for almost every built-in monitors. In the event that you are confused by the settings, you can click on the Info tab to read the related information and documentation.

One thing that I like about GKrellM is that its give you the ability to customize and personalize the settings, yet doesn’t require you to be too technical.

Themes

Being an application based on GTK, GKrellm supports themes and is able to integrate well with all the desktop environment. The default installation comes with 5 different themes, but seriously, they are not the outstanding type that you want to keep on your desktop for long. To download new theme, go to http://www.muhri.net where you can find a great collection of attractive third party themes.

Interested users can also create your own theme by following the documentation here.

Plugins

The best thing about Gkrellm that truly distinguishes itself from its competitors is its large collection of plugins. Just a quick peek at my Synaptic Package Manager shows a page full of GKrellM’s plugins available for installation, and that’s only include those accepted in the repository. There are still plenty of unknown, yet useful third party plugins available at the Gkrellm plugins site. Some of the useful plugins that I have tried and used include gkrellm-reminder (remind you of important stuffs), gkrellm-weather (find out the weather of your area), gkrellm-xmms2 (control your XMMS2 from the desktop), gkrellm-radio (FM radio tuner) and gkrellm-mailwatch (watch your mailboxes in multiple panels).

Cross-platforms compatibility

Gkrellm is available for Linux and Windows. FreeBSD, Mac OSX, NetBSD/OpenBSD and Solaris users may have to compile from source to get it working. Mac users can check out the darwinport for instructions to port GKrellM over to Mac.

Are you a user of GKrellM? We would like to hear your experience with GKrellM in the comment.

How To Use SpeedFan to Remotely Monitor Computer Health

Guy McDowell — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 22:01:10 +0000

In the Oil and Gas industry, our computer users are often several hundreds of miles away from a hamlet, let alone a city. The average user is also much more of a hands-on kind of person and is usually a novice computer user. The environment they work in is rife with dust and dirt and, of course, oil. One of the biggest problems I’ve experienced with my users is CPU overheating due to all the dust and dirt and lack of experience in taking care of a computer.

While looking for a solution to the problem, I came across SpeedFan from the awesomely altruistic Alfredo Milani Comparetti. I saw it on MakeUseOf, over at Monitor Your Computer Fan Speed With SpeedFan. That article covers all the neat stuff, like adjusting fan speed, graphing temperatures and so on. But what it missed is what was most important to me, and anyone else who has to monitor computers on a shoe-string budget – it can send me an e-mail when conditions cross thresholds that I set! Awesome!

SpeedFan can also be set to popup a message, execute a program or script, or beep.

Here’s how I set up SpeedFan for my users:

Open SpeedFan and click on the Configure button.

From there, you need to click on the Mail tab to set up access for SpeedFan to your e-mail account. It’s got to send the message somehow.

The profile name will be default, since Alfredo hasn’t added the ability to have multiple profiles yet. No sweat Alfredo. It’s epic as it is.

Then click on the Events tab.

The bottom of the screen is where you can set the parameters for the event you want triggered. On this example I’m using the Hard Disk Drive (HDD) temperature, but on the work laptops I used the HDD and CPU temperatures. There are an awful lot of variables that can be monitored beyond that though. Check a few:

That’s about half of the list. As you can see, you can monitor your HDD health as well. That should help you head off a few hard drive failures at the pass, and keep your data doggies rolling (remember, I work in the oil patch in Alberta. Gotta have a cowboy analogy in here somewhere!).

I researched the operating parameters of the laptop’s CPU and HDD and then used 80% and 90% of the maximum operating temperature as the trigger points. The lower 80% temperature triggers a pop-up to let the user know that the computer is too hot and that they should blow out the dust and elevate the back of the laptop.

The 90% temperature setting then sends me an e-mail so I can phone the user, wake them up with some Macarena and let them know they are about to have a dead computer. So far I haven’t had to do that.

The For n times parameter allows you to decide how many times the temperature has to exceed the limit before it triggers the event. The temperature is in Celsius. The Allow every n seconds parameter determines how often the event will be triggered. If 60 seconds hasn’t passed since the last e-mail was sent, then it won’t send another one. Keeps form crashing my mail provider.

Then I chose the event send mail. The next field is the subject of the e-mail that will be sent. I use the laptop’s name so I know who to call. Finally, the last field determines which e-mail profile to use. This will be default until the developer adds the ability to have more than one e-mail profile.

Here, let me show you what I mean….

Of course, feel free to adjust those numbers to meet your needs.

All 55 of my field computers are set up with this system that runs silently in the background until something happens. Since I’ve put this into place, I haven’t lost a single laptop to a burnt out CPU or HDD. The time and money this has saved the company is in the thousands. And the software is free!

If you’ve used a different software to achieve something similar, let’s hear all about it in the comments!