Minas6907
26th December 2009, 02:39
Hey Everyone
I have a Pinnacle 801e SE USB TV Tuner, which had worked fine for the last 6 months or so that I've had it. Lately, like just this last week, the video that has been recording has been very very choppy. I think this may be because my laptop is overheating, my conclusions are based off of what I read here: http://www.content4reprint.com/computers/hardware/laptops/how-do-you-know-if-your-laptop-is-overheating.htm
To quote a few things from the site about overheating laptops:
"What Causes a Laptop to Overheat? stop-laptop-overheating
* Using your machine intensively, makes the hard drive, the central processing unit (CPU) and video systems work at a high capacity. If you do a lot of gaming on your laptop, or run a lot of programs at one time such as Photoshop or Dreamweaver, these will be causing the CPU to work some overtime.
* Plugging in USB devices such as dongles and external hard drives
puts a load on the processor
* You may become aware of the fan working more often and sounding louder and/or more vigorous than normal as it tries to cool the computer down"
I thought I read it on this site, but I cant find it. I remember reading something along the lines of when your processor is running hot, it will automatically start running at a lower speed to cool down faster. That really seems to be whats happening with me. For example, last night a few episodes of the show Blue Planet from BBC was on the Animal Planet channel, so I wanted to record them. The first show recorded fine, which was one hour long, but all the rest were incredibly choppy. The same happens with movies, the first hour is fine, but toward the second half of the movie, its unwatchable.
I first started to notice this when I was encoding video for a very long period of time, I'd say like 8 hours or so. When I checked it toward the end, the rendering rate was around 2 fps, which I though was odd, because I normally got 55-60 fps. A few days ago, I started encoding a video in the morning before I left for work, got home late, so the encoding was done, and my TV shows started recording, which they were doing ok (I dont recall exactly how those specific shows came out) and I left my computer on all night to record a movie that was going to be on while I was asleep. I checked it out in the morning, and it was unwatchable. Then basically all the recordings from then on haven't been fairing all that well. I'd say about 80% of what I have recorded in the past few days have gone in the recycle bin.
Also, I noticed that when a show starts to record, my laptop runs significantly slower then it did in the past. For example, while a show was recording, I used to watch an .avi that I already encoded or just browse the net, now both tasks are almost impossible. The video that I would watch on the .avi seems to be a bit slow (nothing compared to the choppiness in the recordings I've been making) and in general, the web browser is very much slower then it normally is.
So what I did today is blow out the dust from the vents of my laptop, I have a movie scheduled to record later this evening, so well see if that made ant sort of difference. But I was wondering, have I taken my laptop too far? Am I using it too much? Also, would it just be dust that is causing the overheating, and not some serious damage I've done to any other components? I used to have a desktop that had a heating issue, and I would have to clean out the heat sink every now and then (until I got a beefy heat sink and fan), and stupid me, I though overheating issues would be gone now that I got a laptop.
Anyways, thanks for reading this if you have. Any thoughts are welcome to remedy the problem. Ask me if you need anymore details. Below are my system specs:
Toshiba Satellite L350D Series Laptop
AMD Turion 64 x2, 2.00 Ghz
3 Gb Ram
Windows Vista Home Premium, Service Pack 1
I have a Pinnacle 801e SE USB TV Tuner, which had worked fine for the last 6 months or so that I've had it. Lately, like just this last week, the video that has been recording has been very very choppy. I think this may be because my laptop is overheating, my conclusions are based off of what I read here: http://www.content4reprint.com/computers/hardware/laptops/how-do-you-know-if-your-laptop-is-overheating.htm
To quote a few things from the site about overheating laptops:
"What Causes a Laptop to Overheat? stop-laptop-overheating
* Using your machine intensively, makes the hard drive, the central processing unit (CPU) and video systems work at a high capacity. If you do a lot of gaming on your laptop, or run a lot of programs at one time such as Photoshop or Dreamweaver, these will be causing the CPU to work some overtime.
* Plugging in USB devices such as dongles and external hard drives
puts a load on the processor
* You may become aware of the fan working more often and sounding louder and/or more vigorous than normal as it tries to cool the computer down"
I thought I read it on this site, but I cant find it. I remember reading something along the lines of when your processor is running hot, it will automatically start running at a lower speed to cool down faster. That really seems to be whats happening with me. For example, last night a few episodes of the show Blue Planet from BBC was on the Animal Planet channel, so I wanted to record them. The first show recorded fine, which was one hour long, but all the rest were incredibly choppy. The same happens with movies, the first hour is fine, but toward the second half of the movie, its unwatchable.
I first started to notice this when I was encoding video for a very long period of time, I'd say like 8 hours or so. When I checked it toward the end, the rendering rate was around 2 fps, which I though was odd, because I normally got 55-60 fps. A few days ago, I started encoding a video in the morning before I left for work, got home late, so the encoding was done, and my TV shows started recording, which they were doing ok (I dont recall exactly how those specific shows came out) and I left my computer on all night to record a movie that was going to be on while I was asleep. I checked it out in the morning, and it was unwatchable. Then basically all the recordings from then on haven't been fairing all that well. I'd say about 80% of what I have recorded in the past few days have gone in the recycle bin.
Also, I noticed that when a show starts to record, my laptop runs significantly slower then it did in the past. For example, while a show was recording, I used to watch an .avi that I already encoded or just browse the net, now both tasks are almost impossible. The video that I would watch on the .avi seems to be a bit slow (nothing compared to the choppiness in the recordings I've been making) and in general, the web browser is very much slower then it normally is.
So what I did today is blow out the dust from the vents of my laptop, I have a movie scheduled to record later this evening, so well see if that made ant sort of difference. But I was wondering, have I taken my laptop too far? Am I using it too much? Also, would it just be dust that is causing the overheating, and not some serious damage I've done to any other components? I used to have a desktop that had a heating issue, and I would have to clean out the heat sink every now and then (until I got a beefy heat sink and fan), and stupid me, I though overheating issues would be gone now that I got a laptop.
Anyways, thanks for reading this if you have. Any thoughts are welcome to remedy the problem. Ask me if you need anymore details. Below are my system specs:
Toshiba Satellite L350D Series Laptop
AMD Turion 64 x2, 2.00 Ghz
3 Gb Ram
Windows Vista Home Premium, Service Pack 1