is it good to keep laptop working for a long time, like 12 hours a day? and what's the normal temperature of cpu? mine is a Dell 600m with pentium-m 1.6G, the average temperature is 54C in normal mode and 62C on high loads.

Most of the laptops I've used recently seem to be around that sort of temperature (50 - 60) though peaking much higher if the fan isn't on. Since laptops tend to run at much higher temperatures that desktop PCs, I don't like them being on unless necessary - my desktop is on 24/7 with the screen turned off when not in use, however, my laptop is only on when I am in front of it.

Your laptop will probably survive being on for that period of time, but personally, I would shut it down and give it a cooling off period when you can - maybe during your lunch break :)?

I only shut down my laptop when I have to - like when bringing it when travelling. I have an AMD Athlon XP 3000+ Mobile (AMD64 core with 64bit functionality turned off) and it never complains. Most of the time I run it at half the maximum clock speed though so it never gets seriously hot.

What really is a problem with most, if not all, laptops when running them on AC all the time is that the battery gets worn out extremely quickly. I usually run on batteries for long periods until it's down to 10% or so when I plug the power cord back in. I don't want my battery to die like it did in my TP600E.

Håkan

how to set the fan to turn on when the temperature reaches a certain level?
it's the first time I heard that it's not good to use laptop with AC plugged in and the battery will be worn out quickly! do other laptops have the same problem or it was just a special case you had?

I used my laptop constantly, it was on for 12 hours or more each day and more at the weekends.

it died last sunday,,, it was 1 year and 3 days old,
the one before that lasted 15 months with similar use.

my advice would be the same as SBing above,, turn it off when you dont use it, and let it cool down every so often by turning it off when you go for lunch or make a coffee etc..

(BTW) it had a 2 year warranty, so Im just waiting to see whether they will replace the MB or the laptop itself.

Only a guess here:

Use cron to run the command every 5 minutes

Find the command to start and stop the fan

Look in /proc for a temperature file, can you see the temperature at the moment (e.g. in gkrellm)? If not you will probably need to install lm_sensors

Try and mash the above into a script ;)

Unfortunately I don't have any laptops with internal sensors around, so I can't really give you the file names :(
Do post back on this issue and let us know what happens, please! I feel really sorry for laptop owners, all the laptops I've been given free have dead batteries anyway, but for people who've gone out and bought them, it must really suck to have something so vital just die on you. Luckily you have a 2 year warranty - Apparently in Britain, many manufacturers refuse to replace batteries even on extended warranty outside of the first year :(!

Steve

the bad penny

do u mean that my laptop will die soon?

@ DreamySmurff

No thats not what I meant,
what I was trying to point out is that notebooks are not designed for prolonged usage the way that desktop's are and that if you look after your laptop, then it should last you a long time.

look at it this way, laptops generate a tremendous ammount of heat which by the design is allowed to dissipate through the chassis and fans etc, but if it doesnt get to cool down every so often then it can move away from the temperature tolerance ranges that the designers have allowed for and slowly cook the motherboard and associated components.
just like it did with mine
(thats why power management is so aggressive on a laptop)

thats all, sorry if I scared you into thinking that your laptop was gonna up and die on you.

if it concerns you in the least then you could contact your laptop manufacturer and ask them what their usage projections were for your model.

@ SBing,
OK, I phoned John Lewis yesterday & they told me that my laptop would be back on friday, but they couldnt comment on the technical side at the moment.

thnx

cuz i was thinking all time about what u said lol

This hasn't been a problem since the days of 286's. Any laptop since then will shut of the battery charging circuit and all now have very smart battery packs that contain microcontrollers which monitor the number of charge cycles of the battery and communicate back with the charger to optimize battery life by adjusting the charge rates. Modern lithium ion batteries typically have a MTBF of 300 cycles so if you run your battery down to 10% each day you could wear that battery out in a year. The last laptop battery I had die was a MiMH in a Pentium 233 and I've ran all my laptops before and after that one 24-7 and have never removed the battery.

One gotcha, there are typically two different classes of laptops, usually denoted as corporate/business and home/homeoffice. The home and home office (I'll pick Dell for an example since thats the brand currently sitting on my lap) such as Dells Inspiron line usually run hotter and sometimes even have desktop cpu's. Those you should are better off avoiding but if your stuck with one don't run them all the time. The laptops like the Dell latitude line are designed to be run all the time since you can't have your office workers shutting down their machines to cool them off. I've paid extra for a business line and have never had any major problems with heat or batteries or otherwise. Current machine is a 1GHZ dell Latitude C400, previous have been Compaq Armada 1700 (PII300), Compaq Armada 1592 (P233), HP Omnibook P100, Grid 486 forget what speed.

I found this site informative about Li batteries.

As I run my laptop off the mains nearly all the time, I have the battery pulled out - charged at about 40%.

I beg to differ. This started to become a real problem when the "smart" batteries arrived. While what you write would be totally correct if the controller built into the battery was actually doing what it's supposed to do, they don't always act like they should. Perhaps all laptops currently in production don't suffer from faulty battery microcontrollers but a lot of earlier ones do, several IBM models (like the 600E) for example. Ralph Levien has a page about the Thinkpad memory issue.

If that's true it really sucks. It's like having a car that will fail after filling up the tank 300 times. A laptop is meant to be mobile and when I was commuting long distance I must have depleted my battery twice a day. Now that was an old Tecra 550CDT and it didn't bother the battery the least (NiMH, perhaps?).


Håkan

Sounds like it may have been a thinkpad design problem. I did have to replace a couple thinkpad batteries for customers over the years so it seems they are different than most. I should say then that ant laptop besides thinkpads you shouldn't have to remove the battery
from the battery site posted "A lithium-ion battery provides 300-500 discharge/charge cycles". What they don't specify that others do it this is full cycles. Partial cycles add up, so you could get 600-1000 50% cycles but the Lithium Ion technology while packing more power than other technologies in the same size package do not last as many cycles. NiMH typically have 1000 cycle MTBF specs. That site does recommend removing the battery due to heat, however the better designed laptops (again the more expensive business modems as opposed to the home ones_ minimize the heat going to the battery so it becomes a non issue. If you have a hot laptop with a desktop cpu or then removing the battery from all that heat may help extend the life but then why bother buying a laptop, you might as well buy a slim desktop and LCD display.

I got my phone call as promised, they fixed my laptop,yaaaahhh!
I now have a new motherboard and some Seagate (allegedly) shockproof 40gb HDD
they also reinstalled XP for me,, wasnt that nice of them,,, LOL
First thing I did was flatten the drive and give 5gb back to XP (I still use autoroute 2003)
the rest went to Slackware.

I suppose my laptop dying the way it did was a blessing in disguise as I now have seperate partitions for /usr, /opt, /var, /tmp & /home and my system is setup nicely again, (with all my changes noted and backed up elsewhere).
I was to lazy to do it before as it meant I had to dump a lot of crap and decide which files I was keeping this way Lost everything from the last month, so I didnt need to make that decision....

Anyway back to the topic,,
As you can see from my adventures above, its probably not a good idea to leave your laptop on for long periods of time.

Computers, in general, are built for continuous use. A computer is not meant to be turned on, shutdownd....turned on, shutdowned....turned on, shutdown...etc.... turning on and shutting down actually hurts your computer!, all that electricity rushing in and rushing out of the system is what causes your computer to ultimately die....it's like if you all of a suddent began sprinting as hard as you could, then stopping, then sprinting again and then stopping.... eventually you're going to hurt your body.... wel same with computers. Computer like to be "stable" meaning ON always, or OFF always, this way there are no suddent electric spikes which are what kill your hardware.

If you are afraid about your laptop....there is a very easy way....when ever you are done using it....just shut the screen, and let me sit there in sleep mode! The computer is still ON, but only using up a slight amount of electricity. And when you wake it, since the electricity is already there, there is no danger of electric spikes.