The temperature went over one hundred degrees here today, as it does sometimes (more often lately, but we all know that). At about 2pm the guys who messed up our ducts came back and fixed out ducts, and life was good — the best cooling this house has ever known. Until about 4pm. That’s when the AC shut down entirely. Hopefully it’s just a matter of replacing (again) the ridiculously huge fuses on the unit. (Although huge fuses mean huge power and BLOWING huge fuses means maybe it’s time to replace the damn thing.)
It’s warm in here right now. Warm enough that my laptop, already prone to run hotter than one would think necessary, essentially shut itself down to prevent it from burning itself up.
My laptop is a MacBook, and they are not generally considered good gaming machines for two reasons: one, the hottest games don’t run on Macs, and two, because Macs aren’t built to dissipate the heat that comes with the massive processing in a modern computer game.
But today I wasn’t running any graphic-intensive game. I did play NetHack for a while, but that is the opposite of graphics-intensive. And because I was playing on NAO, even that processing was happening in a data center somewhere (or perhaps, a linux box under someone’s desk).
MacBooks, when overheating, use a process to simply block out all other programs part of the time, to reduce the load so the computer can cool down. I reached a point today where the safety program was taking up all the time.
I quit any program that was even using the slightest CPU and the situation did not improve. I shut down the machine, waited a few minutes, and started it back up to the slowest reboot since DOS was on floppies, because the kernel task went straight to maximum protection.
Finally, I went to the freezer and pulled out a cold pack I use on my knee. I put the computer to sleep, and set the thing right onto the cold pack, and when I woke it up the machine was happy. For a little while, at least.
I have now used a second cold pack, which is why I’m able to write this right now.
If you search for “Refrigerated Laptop Cooling Pad” or any of a hundred permutations, you will get lots of hits, but none of them are actually refrigerated. They just have lots of fans. And while I’m sure that helps, I’m a little surprised that there’s no active cooling. The top-tier game machines have liquid cooling built directly into the enclosure. It doesn’t seem a stretch to extend the heat sink of a metal-hulled laptop with a refrigerated system to take the heat away.
I’m filing this episode under Get Poor Quick because this is such a golden opportunity for the right person. Get on that, right person! Make the Chill Spot. I’m tired of my laptop shutting itself down!
