Laptopfilter: I'm curious about how CPU usage, noise level, and being able to go to standby/hibernation and shut down properly are related. For a long time (over a year, I think) my HP laptop(running Windows XP) was at 100% CPU usage all the time, ran loudly, and wouldn't go to standby or hibernation or shut down all the way. There's a lot
When this started: I packed it up one day, closing the cover and putting it in the case as I usually did (I had it set to either hibernate or go to standby when I closed the cover) except in a bit more of a hurry than usual. When I opened it back up, it wasn't on standby--the lights in front weren't doing the "in standby" thing where one of them slowly blinks, and nothing I did would bring it out. I had to turn it off by holding the power button in, and restarted it. I soon noticed that several things had changed:
CPU usage was always at 100%, whereas normally it would stay between 1% and 10% and only spike occasionally when I started an application or something. It would also be quite loud.
When I tried to put it into standby or hibernation, the screen would go blank--
not as if it were turned off, but more screensaver-black. It would not come out of this and would need to be turned off and restarted.
It also wouldn't shut down properly, and would get stuck at the "Windows is shutting down" screen. I could turn it off at this point, and it seemed to treat this as a proper shutdown--it didn't do that "Windows was shut down improperly" thing when I restarted.
Lastly, the screen would occasionally go dark for a few seconds and then come back. Again, this was screensaver-black, not turned-off-black. It seemed to stop doing this for a while (months at a time) but would still occasionally do it.
It
didn't seem to be overheating (I could touch it, even use it on my lap, without being burned. Although for a while I absolutely refused to leave it on when I wasn't there, I started using it for longer and longer periods of time and it never seemed to get too hot). It also didn't seem to be running any slower than normal, and aside from the things I mentioned seemed to be working completely normally. I could even log out and log back in; it was only standby, hibernation, and shutdown that wouldn't work.
(I did mean to get it checked out, believe me, and I backed up all my data when it started, but it would have meant
clearing off my porn cleaning up my hard drive and paying someone and since I 1)was lazy and 2)didn't really have the spare cash, I just watched it carefully and fretted. As time went on and nothing else happened, it seemed considerably less urgent.)
I ran virus scans, of course, but really I thought it was probably some kind of hardware issue (because of the noise and because it didn't seem to be affecting most functioning) and that I'd somehow jostled something out of place. This theory seemed to be reinforced when I was testing out some Linux live cds and it still did the CPU thing and the noise thing (although it would let me shut down) and for some of them wouldn't boot from the cd unless I turned it off and let it cool down first.
Fast-forward to the present. I recently switched to Opera out of frustration with Firefox's increasing slowness and need for me to restart it every few hours and reboot every couple days or so. Opera was much better about this and I could leave it up all the time. So, for the first time in a while I'd left my computer on for more than a couple days at a time and it, I believe, overheated and shut itself down. (I wasn't using it at the time, but the sudden lack of noise made me go over and check, and it did seem hotter than normal. I propped it up to let the air circulate more, and turned it on when it seemed cool to make sure it would start.) It had
never done this before.
I did a quick search and from what I found, I thought it seemed likely that the fan was clogged, so I took out the battery and partially opened up the case. (Only partially, because even after I unscrewed all the screws I could find, it was still attached somehow at the front.) I carefully poked a q-tip around in the fan area and it came out slightly dusty but not with an amount of dust that seemed like it would actually clog the fan. I closed it back up and blew hard a couple times into the air intake. Nothin'.
When I started it back up, it was running like it had been before all this started. CPU usage was normal; it could hibernate and go into standby normally. It was also much quieter--a normal level of noise. "Fixed!" I thought, and also, more quietly, "WTF?".
Then, a few days later, it turned itself off
again, this time while I was using it. (When I started it up, it didn't do the "Windows was shut down improperly" thing, either.)
Before that, I had it on a table with a few sheets of newspaper on it--a reasonably hard surface, I thought. Now, it's on four carefully placed decks of cards (it's stable, and the left-back one isn't covering the air intake) to give it more circulation around it. I'm also keeping an eye on the temperature and noise level now--I've noticed that a sudden increase in noise often coincides with a spike in CPU usage, but it doesn't go down as soon as CPU usage goes down. What's up with that? (Is the lag just because it takes the fan a little while to dissipate enough of the heat?)
So--what was going on? Did my poking around fix things, somehow jostle something back into place? What's going on now? Is the fan just starting to fail now? Does this, as I assume it does, mean I shouldn't leave it on and not on standby overnight (the noise helped me sleep. I should probably just look into a white noise machine)?
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posted by ijsbrand at 11:55 PM on January 31, 2007 [1 favorite]