[rescue] Good day's grabs

[Tim H.]

On Sun, 11 Aug 2002 21:03:29 -0700 (PDT)
Lionel Peterson <lionel4287 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> AAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!
> 
> You left it on for how long? 24 hours?
> 
> Did you purposefully "disconnect" the power-saving/auto-shutdown
> settings in the OS?
> 
> Mine gets hot, but wants to shutdown when left alone for too long...
> (the flashing little "dot" under the display)
> 
> You didn't aggrivate the situation by leaving it on a comforter or
> some such???

My opinion has always been that a laptop should run fine forever sitting
on a soft surface such as a bed or sofa.  I have always though that an
extra eighth of an inch in any dimension would be a small price to pay
for that reliability.  Unfortunately companies don't always do that.  I
have a friend with a Tadpole sparcbook, and he actually runs a PCMCIA
blower to cool that one.  

The very fact that pcmcia blowers exist proves to me that companies
aren't designing with my opinion of correct parameters, if the machine
needs a blower, it should be built in.  I do like the Intel approach of
processor throttling, I would always save the hardware at the cost of
performance, But I don't like the software controlled aspect.  I think
thermal management should be a hardware/firmware thing so the OS is
totally uninvolved.  

I know when Win2K crashes on my wife's laptop it is defenseless, and
will literally cook itself.  One time it crashed when attempting to
suspend when the lid was closed, and got so hot it actually affected on
of the adhesive layers in the display, it appeared to be behind the
active layer, and it looked like someone had dumped water on it.  Took a
week or so, but it did go away.  It was so hot that time that when I
restarted it the fan in it actually was loud for a while, before it
throttled back.