That's what it looks like idling on a cooling pad. I've felt it getting hot for a while now, but only recently did I run speedfan to see if anything was wrong. I don't know where exactly you guys would draw your line of concern, but I'm pretty sure temperatures high enough to cook rice are well beyond it.

I got this used off of craigslist, and it came with Windows Vista(which was having trouble reinstalling), so I promptly put Win7 Ultimate on it instead(no drivers were available for XP). It is an HP Pavilion dv2000 series, with an AMD Turion 64x2 processor, an NVidia GeForce 7 series GPU, and at present 2 GB of ram(had 3, gave one to my mom). One of my other problems was that I was getting absolutely terrible performance in games(at times even struggling to run quake 3 derivatives). At first I chocked that up to having more terrible integrated video hardware than I was initially led to believe, but now I wonder if that could be tied in to the overheating problems I'm having. There are also 3 components I was unable to find drivers for:


Could any of these missing drivers be causing the lack of performance and ridiculous heating? Could I have installed the wrong drivers for my video card? Any insight you guys could offer would be greatly appreciated. For now I'll have to shut down and browse the forums from my PSP or another computer...

And yes, I checked for dust, there doesn't appear to be any blocking the fan ports and I was told it was cleaned up before I picked it up from the guy.

94C? I'm surprised you don't have a molten pile of plastic and aluminum. My steps:

1) Blow out vents with compressed air
2) Make sure you can feel the air motion when the fans are running
3) Trying making speedfan force the fans to max speed and see what happens
4) If the computer suffered any disassembly or hard knocks, make sure the heat pipe (copper assembly) is properly secured to the GPU and CPU
5) Reapply thermal compound to CPU and GPU after thoroughly cleaning off old compound

Yeah, my old laptop used to get really hot while idling too. Cleaning out the air vents and fans with compressed air helped bring the temperature down, so you should definitely try that. You could also change the fan settings in the BIOS. Are you running any CPU intensive applications such as Handbrake in the background?

I also had that with my old laptop, and it would go as high as 90C (Though, I was playing UT, when it was doing nothing, it was at 84ish). Cleaning out the vents made it much, much cooler. I also second getting a can of compressed air and blowing at the main vent(s) and getting some dust (that I assume is there) out.

Lack of performance is because the hardware is really slow. The stuff you are missing drivers for is unlikely to be causing issues, but possibly the fan control software is missing and the BIOS is stuck in quiet operation mode or something stupid like that.

Try resetting the BIOS to factory defaults, and make sure you get all the drivers from HP's site.

If you're not too afraid to open the thing, a thorough cleaning of all the little nooks and crannies can help a lot as well, since not all dust gathers around the fan ports or their main air paths.

Keep in mind kllrnohj, his BIOS might force underclocking at high temps, or maybe the OS has some special drivers to do the same. It wouldn't surprise me.

The missing devices shouldn't be the problem, but as kllrnohj said, it might be some stupid BIOS default.

I've tried getting drivers from HP's site. They have like 3 or 4 different hardware options for my model of laptop and I have no idea which of combination of those I'm using. That said I have downloaded everything I could find, from the video card to everything else that was listed.

I'll check the BIOS next and when I find my toolkit I'll open this sucker up and follow Kerm's initial suggestions.

This reminds me of my friends laptop, he noticed it was getting very hot and seemed to be running slower due to it. When he called HP they said that it was normal and within spec for his laptop to be reaching 95C according to speed fan and that he shouldn't worry about it. I almost fell off my chair when I heard this, sure the processor may be rated to run at those temps but that can't be good for the rest of the hardware.

I got it as apart as I could(two of the screws wouldn't budge and what was unscrewed had no interest in separating as best I could tell) and I blew out as much dust as I could(of which there was surprisingly little, except for on the hard-drive). I have noticed that speedfan does not list ANY fans, and there are no fan settings in the BIOS. I'm guessing one of those base system devices is the fan controller, although I do hear the fan spinning. Right now the GPU is hoving at around 72 degrees, with everything else in the 40-50s. That's acceptable, but not great, and I still have the problem of getting far less performance than I know this hardware is capable of(GeForce 7 struggling to run quake 3 mods? No f--king way)

That's about right.



No, it's a very low end GeForce 7 mobile. What settings are you trying to run? And what mods? 1024x768 on medium/low seems to be pretty much the limits:

http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=4145

Ahhhhhh that makes sense. I couldn't get over why my mom's laptop, which has an inferior processor and an ATI integrated card was completely raping my own. That explains a lot. So I basically have the same damn hardware I had in my netbook. Well at least I didn't spend too much on it...

That's a bummer. Selling both your new laptop and the netbook might bring in a enough cash to get something decent?

Also 90C is WAY hotter than even my MBP gets in high power mode.

Your netbook probably had an Atom? In which case your new laptop should be destroying it.

@Elf: How are you monitoring temps in OS X? Also, GPU and CPU have different thermal requirements. But 90C is too hot, definitely.

Nope, the netbook is currently in pieces in my drawer. It's missing it's RAM, the plastic casing is cracked and broken in multiple places, and the internal display cable won't carry a signal in the upright position. I might as well scrap it at this point. I was thinking of salvaging the tiny internal usb webcam to use as a spy camera...



Yes, and the newer laptop does get slightly better performance, but not by much. The Turion processor is great, but the video hardware holds it back.

Darn, can we actually cook stuff on those laptops?

That would be an amusing mod: A heatsink that hooks to a frying pan surface.

A GeForce 7150M still roflstomps Intel's crap integrated GPU chipset in the Atom...



http://www.phys.ncku.edu.tw/~htsu/humor/fry_egg.html

Though not directed at me, though I use OS X. I install iStat Pro. Does a good job for what I need.

I am too lazy to actually make my own post so instead I quote people and then don't say anything new. I use the iStat Pro dashboard widget.

The only atom-based anything I have has another GPU in it: the nvidia ION (essentially a 7200 Mobility geforce) so I can't say anything about the Atom's internal video. It can run minecraft! poorly, but still.

Edit: Wait, ATI does the radeon I meant geforce