here are some instances where i have damaged computers by (capriciously?) running prime95!
1 - i just got my wife's toshiba laptop back from toshiba warranty service. running prime95 for ~6 months on it caused the fan to die, and then the laptop would overheat & shutdown even without prime95 running. apparently the heat caused lots of disk badblocks too. 2 - my manager at work here had a thinkpad. he ran prime95 despite my worry that it was very "tough" on laptops. within a few months his harddrive failed - possibly due to months of excess heat... :| this could be considered a classic Dilbertian CLM (career limiting move) on my part, but no worry since my manager is super-cool. 3 - i also ran the prime95 app for a year or so on an ancient cyrix p120+ which had a cpu-fan that stopped. after a couple months of no-cpu-fan, that cpu died completely... 4 - i bought a 2Ghz P4 recently. despite initial worries that it was running too hot (70 C) because fan was too slow (2800 rpm), i got adventurous and clocked the cpu at 2.1 Ghz for a day. weeks later the machine started acting very badly (motherboard cpu temp alarm caused shutdown @ 90 C even without prime95 running). so i returned it to the vendor. they claimed that my overclocking it broke the P4, and that the top of the cpu was actually burnt/blackened from the heat. this is counter to my belief that improper fan/heatsink was the cause, but i can't prove it. also it runs counter to what i've read here & elsewhere about the thermal-protection built into P4s 1.7Ghz or faster. they are returning the P4 to intel to see if Intel will replace it for free, but in the meantime i have to pay for a new cpu! (i'm picking 1.8Ghz this time.) so far my count is "4" for computers i've damaged with the help of the the prime95 application. but i'll keep running it because it is the coolest application around (in a hot way). /eli _________________________________________________________________________ Unsubscribe & list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
