hi! oh yes, i did have that toshiba laptop fan replaced under warranty... the service dude said it was unusual to have such a fan fail even if it was on 24x7. and yes the toshiba laptop fan is obnoxiously loud and cycles on and off depending on what the cpu is up to. i no longer run prime95 on that laptop. it's a satellite-pro/celeron-600-Mhz or something close to that.
i didn't try anything like blowing cool air on my various PCs/laptops - rather they were subjected to hot air exuding from myself, not unlike what readers of mailing lists which i inhabit are prone to experience.
i've tried PCs/laptops in a variety of environments though. most of the year my 1.8Ghz P4 & AMD 900 Mhz systems are in the basement. i don't bother applying power to the AMD system much any more - it's too slow. the basement - it is not very damp down there but somewhat so.
sinclair zx80, heh heh, that's a blast from the past alright. ok, how about the altair mits 8080 :) i'm not sure whether those nifty beasties had cooling fans, but probably... not that such machines had enough RAM, but a single LL iteration time would probably be 3 years. :)
as for the 10W or 20W from the cpu fan being totally insigificant, that is in the green (?) eyes of the beholder/electricity-bill-payer. personally i'm happy to run most of my raft of PCs 24x7 with prime95, up until the point where i consider the CPU to be too old/slow/AMD to be worth spending the kilowatt*hours. such as with the 900 Mhz AMD system.
on my HP/Amd system i'm pretty sure it's the cpu fan i'm hearing. but maybe the power supply fan is variable-speed too. it's got a ~2Ghz cpu but as you know it's not good at LL testing with prime95. i don't run it 24x7 due to the noise and the heat, especially in non-winter. it's in my TV-room where any fan noise annoys me greatly!
hmm, i have not noticed bios settings on any of my PCs for "quiet" operation but i will look for that some day. if it's apt to slow down prime95 operation, i'll probably forgo it however!
one of my PC CPU temps sometimes reaches 70C when running prime95 in summer. it's been running like that for years. heh heh. i just moved it back to the basement today. 1.8Ghz P4 / win98.
re the partition failure, i respect your "NO" opinion, but i am convinced that prime95 can increase the propensity for most any sort of odd failure to occur, as well as many other sorts of failures. increased heating of components & disk-drive movings parts can account for a 'direct' enough causation, as far as i'm concerned. when voltages & temperatures are near thresholds, any disk write to cyl N head M sector P could end up writing to 0,0,0 instead. additionally on a VERY HOT reboot, a read of 0,0,0 could turn into a write of 0,0,0. blammo, bye-bye birdie boot sector.
the # of my friends and acquiantances who have had their PCs fail in strange ways after running prime95 is enough that i warn folks on my "prime team" beforehand about the possibility. thankfully many of my friends & coworkers are like me - they know that any CPU with power applied ought to be doing real work - and what could be better than hunting primes! .
thanks for all the ideas, Brian & everyone! cheers !
/eli
_______________________________________________ Prime mailing list [email protected] http://hogranch.com/mailman/listinfo/prime
