[ltp] RE: Noisy T41p and T40p??

[Uwe Walter]

Hi.

> > From: Werner Becker <web@o22.xray.mpe.mpg.de>
> >    I'm planing to buy a T41p though I read in a computer magazine a
> >  note that several T41p user have complained that the T41p is much more
> >  noisy (e.g. fan?) than previous T-models.

You don't happen to mean the letter to the editor in the last c't, do you?

I read that similar opinion, a few days after we ordered two T40p at work
and was immediately worried. Perfect timing... ;-)


> >  who have a T41p and can comment on this?  What's about the T40p which is
> >  not 'that brand new' and not much different in performance compared with
> >  the T41p I suppose??

Intel's Pentium M is quite allright, however, problematic might be the very
flat construction of the T40 s :-), the graphic chip and the hard disc
(and probably the memory, too). [1]

My T40p has the Fire GL 9000 graphic chip (the T41p has the faster Fire GL
T2), the HD runs at 7,2Krpms (but reports only 35°C) and the P-M 1,6Ghz runs
most of the time at 600Mhz, but...

...the fan is still running very often.

:-/


Compared to my old dell, it runs very calm (Still! I hope it will stay like
this!), but nevertheless it runs, even when idle. And yes, it sometimes
changes the noise frequency, but I do not have my thinkpad long enough to
say, how disturbing that will be to me).

Up to now, I still want to keep my T40p!



* Wayne Piekarski <wayne@cs.unisa.edu.au> [03/12/03 12:52]:
> While we are on the fan noise topic, does anyone know if it is possible to
> use tpctl or any other tool to control the speed of the fan?

I would be interested in that, too. The dell fans could be controlled via
the i8k-stuff (comparable to tpctl for thinkpads), which was quite nice.

Probably, the ACPI fan module could help here, but I have not yet tried that
(and probably won't in the near future, since I do not want to switch to
ACPI yet)...


> If you run ide-smart with the -0 option it turns off this feature
> and I haven't found the drive running as much as it used to, which is nice
> and should hopefully conserve more power as well. One problem is that the -1
> switch doesn't seem to turn it back on again, so I'm not sure if it stuck in
> this mode now, so please be careful when you do this.

You could give "smartctl" from the "smartmontools"-package a try. It was at
least two times successful for me in turning the automatic checks on, where
ide-smart failed...

> know if others have played with this as well and if there are any problems?

Theory is, the HD might not notice arising problems as soon as with regular
automatic SMART checks. One could argue about that, since hard disks can die
slowly or apruptly. I would at least recommend to frequently check the SMART
status, even with extended checks disabled, e.g. at boot time (or more often
by running a daemon like smartd from the package above).

 

Greetings, UW(e)


[1]
A good source for comparisons is the following document about IBM's
notebook models:
http://www5.pc.ibm.com/us/me.nsf/webdocs/Personal+Systems+Reference:IBM+ThinkPad+Notebooks:English/$FILE/tabook.pdf
(I hope, the link works. If not, enter at
http://www5.pc.ibm.com/us/me.nsf/relatedinformation?OpenAgent&key=Thinkpad+literature&&cntry=US#send
and download "IBM Thinkpad models")