How much time can a notebook be on, and on ....

[rui.m.godinho]

I have desktop 1,4 athlon etc and etc. I have most of time turn on about 24h a day. But I am willing to buy a notebook (1.2 pentium III) just to enconde some divx. Do you know how much time can we have turn on a notebook. Do you think that having it on 24 horous a day will ruin it or damage it. What's your experience ?

[Taric25]

My father purchased a Labtop last year, and it works well for small ammounts of time, but not for long ammounts of time. First, let me give the system specifications:

Pentim III 500 MHz mobile copermine processor with Speedstep™ technonogy
128MB SDRAM (1 DIMM)
6 GB 5200 RPM hard drive
DVD-ROM Drive
3.5" 1.44MB floppy drive

When we are using the labtop, we have to keep it on a flat surface. If we don't, then it overheats. If we want to use the labtop for a long amount of time, even if it is on a falt surface, it sill overheats. We must suspend the labtop above the falt surface and only keep the part that does not have vents covered (we do this with books, etc.).

My suggestions to you:

Don't keep the vents covered at all.
Keep the labtop suspended above a surface (NOT like the power-save feature called "suspend").
Make sure it is running in a well ventilated area.
Make sure powersave features are on, but not so many features that it would stop DivX encoding (such as, turn off monitor(s) after x minutes, but NOT turn off hard disk(s) after x minutes).

I hope that this helps.

[smiller667]

Hi,

I have a generic PIII 1GHz laptop ... desktop CPU, no speedstep :). I used it for doing a VCD once (for lack of a desktop PC), it sat on a level surface (standard desk) & did its job without any overheating. The fan ran most of the time, though ...
Why would you want to use a laptop if you have desktop PC for the same job? Given the same CPU, it will do its job faster, won't have any heat problems (some crappy laptop designs used to actually melt part of the casing) ... one of the first things to die in a laptop would be the backlight in the display - so be sure to have that switched off by your setup after a reasonable time.

[Pojken Purken]

I have a Fujitsu Siemens Celeron 500 running 24h a day. Heat IS an immense problem. The HD died once and I had it replaced. It has been running fine since then but I'm just waiting for the next crash. In my experience (working with Toshiba, Fujitsu and IBM professionally for 15 years) IBM is the manufacturer that has succeded best in controlling the heat. They have the most innovative solutions.

/PP