Folding@Home Weekly Team News - 2nd June 2006

[Parsley]

Are laptops able to run at higher temperatures than Desktops or something? Mine is roasting, it is madly hot to the touch after playing BF2.

 

[Joe42]

Are laptops able to run at higher temperatures than Desktops or something? Mine is roasting, it is madly hot to the touch after playing BF2.

Its not so much able to run at higher temperatures, as being unable to fit in adequate cooling to run at lower temperatures. Although Pentium M cpu's will go to 100 before they throttle or shut down and thats higher than a desktop cpu would get to. The gpu is usually ok because they can go over 100 anyway.
I measured the plastic on the outside of mine at 50, and thats hotter than the cpu was at the time, and i've no idea what component was under that part (bottom left corner, too far away from the cpu to be the chipset could have been the gpu...). I find my wireless module gets stinking hot aswell.
Be carefull with it, as a lot of it probably relies on passive cooling and its probably near its limits in this weather. Make sure you have plenty of airflow underneath and have a break every hour or so and let it cool down. I find turning it upside down for a while helps a lot.
Download this to keep an eye on temps, but don't mess around with voltages unless you know what your doing.

 

[Joe42]

Does anyone know of a way of delaying startup programs?
I'm finding the system gets bogged down with too many taskbar items and services and i'd like to be able to set a few of them to load, say 1 minute after startup. Windows scheduled tasks has an option for 'run when idle' but thats no use because its never idle...
I just want a piece of software with some more advanced scheduling options...

 

[Parsley]

Its not so much able to run at higher temperatures, as being unable to fit in adequate cooling to run at lower temperatures. Although Pentium M cpu's will go to 100 before they throttle or shut down and thats higher than a desktop cpu would get to. The gpu is usually ok because they can go over 100 anyway.
I measured the plastic on the outside of mine at 50, and thats hotter than the cpu was at the time, and i've no idea what component was under that part (bottom left corner, too far away from the cpu to be the chipset could have been the gpu...). I find my wireless module gets stinking hot aswell.
Be carefull with it, as a lot of it probably relies on passive cooling and its probably near its limits in this weather. Make sure you have plenty of airflow underneath and have a break every hour or so and let it cool down. I find turning it upside down for a while helps a lot.
Download this to keep an eye on temps, but don't mess around with voltages unless you know what your doing.

Cheers, I won't go messing with voltages, I have done it with my desktop but this laptop is something I don't want to mess up (not until it is older anyway). It gets hottest on the bottom right of my laptop, and I am pretty sure that is where the graphics card is.
The idea of giving it a break every hour is a good one I think... I will take that on board .

 

[Parsley]

I don't suppose you know how resource intensive that program you recommended is do you? It looks quite good .

 

[Joe42]

I don't suppose you know how resource intensive that program you recommended is do you? It looks quite good .

You should give it a try. I didn't find it resource intensive at all, just sits in the taskbar like speedfan but its more tailored for laptops.

 

[Mr. Brightside]

I've been using NHC on my laptop for a month or two now. As a guide to resource use, it's currently using 4mB of memory while in tray, goes to 8mB when the window is open. As for CPU usage, my laptop has been up 7 days 14 hours and it's used 1 minute 30 of CPU time. Though the laptop's been on standby a lot.

About two weeks ago I think, I decided to give undervolting a go. Laptop is a Dell Inspiron 6000 with Dothan 1.73. Stock voltage is ~1v and ~1.3v at 6x and 13x multipliers respectively. I managed to lower both by ~0.3v, to ~0.7v and ~1v.

My load temps at 13x multi are now 10c cooler than before, and when running on battery *not crunching*, I've managed to better than counter the 25% wear on the battery; I can get 3 hours 30 mins on the 6 cell battery, when it was new I got 3 hours 20 mins or so. I calculated that if I were to get a 9 cell battery, with no wear, it would run for 7 hours however I think I must have made an error somewhere, I reckon 6 hours is more realistic.

All in all it's a great piece of software for laptops, should give it a try

 

[Parsley]

I'm not sure I want to mess about with the voltages on my laptop, how did you go about doing it safely? At least if I mess up my desktop bits are easily (more easily anyway) replaced.

 

[Mr. Brightside]

I'm not sure I want to mess about with the voltages on my laptop, how did you go about doing it safely? At least if I mess up my desktop bits are easily (more easily anyway) replaced.

Afaik there is no way that undervolting can possibly do hardware damage. At worst it would cause software errors and make you have to reinstall. Just take things slowly, one step at a time and you can be pretty sure of spotting instability before any serious errors occur. But Windows is pretty good in that way anyway, detects them and just reboots.

NHC even has a built in stability checker, when you set a new voltage it does a quick 15 second preliminary check. Of course once I'd found what I thought was the spot, I ran Prime95 for a day to be sure. Also, make sure to stop and disable the FAH service on the laptop first, that way you avoid messing up WUs - only enable once you're sure it's stable.

 

[Joe42]

I'm not sure I want to mess about with the voltages on my laptop, how did you go about doing it safely? At least if I mess up my desktop bits are easily (more easily anyway) replaced.

I recomended it for temperature monitoring, it won't do anything with voltages at all unless you want to. Its just a useful feature that it has.

 

[Parsley]

Cheers for the info guys, you've been quite a help.

 

[Stan_Lite]

Talking of heat, my shiny new X2 3800 has failed me

I asked one of my buddies to take a look along and try rebooting it. He reported back saying he'd done it 3 times but it would lock up after 15-20 minutes.
He said that the plumbers had finally been to install a new gas boiler after over a year of problems with the hot water and the place was like an oven.

He asked if there was anything he could try so I e-mailed him with detailed instructions on how to step back the overclock - dunno if he'll have the bottle though as the only time he's seen the bios on a PC is when he's been in the room when I've been messing around in mine. He asked what I was doing at the time so I explained that this was the bios and I was tweaking my overclock and gave him a brief explanation as to what I meant - the glazed eyes told me it was time to stop

I also asked him to switch off the bloody central heating. Damn plumbers should have known to turn it off when they fitted the new boiler

Stan

Ok. Quoting my own post

My buddy had the bottle after all and managed to get the thing running again - although the fact that the new boiler has packed in already may have helped.
Only problem is that only one of the F@H services has started, he other one thinks it is already running. I have had this same trouble with this same rig before. The other 2 X2s never do this but this one does

Anyway, I was wondering if any of you can help me get it started remotely. I have remote access to one of the other machines and therefore access to the network.
Does anyone know if there is any way I can start the second client remotely over the network?

Stan

 

[Zip]

Whens the next Weekly news update going to be released? What day?

I have had the computer running 24/7 since i started and want to see how it compares to every one elses and dont want to miss the news thread

 

[Admiral Huddy]

I'm still puzzled as to ahy i have 14 processors but they still don't produce as much as someone with 7... I should be steaming past BigDom and Billy!! but i'm not

 

[oceaness]

Ok. Quoting my own post

My buddy had the bottle after all and managed to get the thing running again - although the fact that the new boiler has packed in already may have helped.
Only problem is that only one of the F@H services has started, he other one thinks it is already running. I have had this same trouble with this same rig before. The other 2 X2s never do this but this one does

Anyway, I was wondering if any of you can help me get it started remotely. I have remote access to one of the other machines and therefore access to the network.
Does anyone know if there is any way I can start the second client remotely over the network?

Stan

If you have full access to one machine than you can actually use the remote desktop function within XP (pro I think) and then can then have full control over any PC just as if you we're sitting at it just by typing it's name and a username and password but you have to go through and setup remote desktop to allow connections on all the PC's

 

[Stan_Lite]

I'm still puzzled as to ahy i have 14 processors but they still don't produce as much as someone with 7... I should be steaming past BigDom and Billy!! but i'm not

Beats me mate. Are they on 24/7? What kind of processors are we talking here?

I have only 9 + the occasional WU from my brother's laptop and my 24hr average is over 500 more than yours and that's with one of my X2s being o** for a few days, when I'm back up to full production, I will be about 800-900 ahead of you

Stan

 

[Stan_Lite]

If you have full access to one machine than you can actually use the remote desktop function within XP (pro I think) and then can then have full control over any PC just as if you we're sitting at it just by typing it's name and a username and password but you have to go through and setup remote desktop to allow connections on all the PC's

I've had a look at that aand the client PC must have XP pro on it (which is fine as the PC in question runs XP Pro X64) but as you said, it needs to be set up first (which it isn't ). My other machines are all XP home so, unless I get a remote desktop app for those, I will just have to hope they don't fall down.

I use Logmein.com to access the one I have access to but it's the free version, which only allows access to 1 PC. The full version would cost a small fortune to access all of my machines remotely.

Stan

 

[oceaness]

You can always use something like RealVNC.
Just the same as the XP Pro Remote Desktop only it's much more powerful.

I prefer XP Pro Remote Desktop for the very reason it's simple and is installed anyway with XP Pro so it means I don't have to install and configure anything extra.

Though saying that, it only allows you to take control of a PC thats on and has loaded Windows the same as the XP Pro Remote Desktop.

See what you really need is a robot that you can connect to and use that to fix the other PC's

 

[Stan_Lite]

See what you really need is a robot that you can connect to and use that to fix the other PC's

That's exactly what I need.

/goes off to see rig welder and rig electrician

Stan

 

[rich99million]

Whens the next Weekly news update going to be released? What day?

I have had the computer running 24/7 since i started and want to see how it compares to every one elses and dont want to miss the news thread

it should be tommorrow but as I'm going away tomorrow then I think I'll do it tonight - don't worry you won't be able to miss it