How hot can I let my computer become? I have a notebook and sometimes I really do think I could fry an egg on it. Is there a temperature at which it becomes dangerous for the machine? Is there a way to know what the temperature is? How concerned should I be about this? I have heard friends use the term overclocking. What is that?
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It has long been something of a problem to keep the temperature of computers - desktops and notebooks - as low as possible. The faster the chips run, the hotter they become and we all know that there is no limit to the speed we want them to achieve: the faster, the better.
There are a lot of issues here, and there are a few things you can do to monitor your machine.
For the PC there is a free application called Motherboard Monitor, which can be downloaded from several sites. It will give a reading of the temperature, the RPM of the fan and other bits and pieces of data collected at the BIOS level.
It will let you set alarms when things get to a certain temperature, or will even send an e-mail to another computer. Some programs can be stopped (or started) with this. That may sound great - and it is a lot of fun for those who know what they are doing - but in practice it may not be worth much if you have no idea about what the temperatures mean.
That can depend on what you have. The MBM site has a long list of CPUs and vendor information on them. Although it may be fun to know what the temperature of your machine is, there is little you can do to cool it down (especially a notebook) except turn it off. You can do a little more with a desktop, but that is usually the domain of those who enjoy treating their machines as a hobby. If all you want to do is work (or play), you may not want to spend much time on this.
