Re overheating, cpu usage etc.

I’m not a computer engineer but I have done a fair amount of computer troubleshooting as well as repairs on other electronic products using similar technology.

The heat question is real but is not a problem for any well designed system, here are a few observations.

CPU’s and other electronics are designed with a normal operating temperature range in mind. This temperature is not room temperature but significantly above it, in fact the difference between idle and max is only a few degrees. The fan in the computer maintains this temperature by varying its speed just as your car maintains its engine temperature. So long as you stay within the design limits of the system, the fan will maintain the appropriate temperature. The design limits have to include 100% operation as this is in fact what really determines the design limit. The reason a processor is rated at a given speed is largely because that is the maximum speed at which it can dissipate heat reliably. Most if not all current processors could be run at a higher speed if you could remove heat fast enough. You overclockers out there know what I mean since that is the first thing you do. Also, this is why , in the past it was recommended that you leave your computer on all the time as systems are more reliable if maintained in a narrow temperature range and the worst thing you can do is turn them on and off.

Secondly,a well designed system would have a safety system which only kicks in when the design parameters have been exceeded. This is a failsafe that will shut the system down before it can harm itself or you. Every home heating system has one, it is called an overtemp sensor and it is there to protect the system and to protect you, and it is mandated by law. Generally you cannot sell anything in the US or most other countries if it does not have this protection. That is what all those approvals are for.

Thirdly, as to the peripheral wear, ie hard drives etc. I opened up the performance monitor on my computer and confirmed my suspicion that the actual amount of disk access is significantly less than what I normally do just surfing the web. In fact, since disk access is a very slow process, I suspect the program is optimized to avoid it. My commit charge is almost exactly my physical ram which is rarely the case, this indicates that the program is not using virtual memory and is avoiding excess disk operations.

All that being said, the comments about the noise from the fan are real and legitimate. The fan that cools the cpu will probably not last as long as the cpu itself and wasn’t really designed to. The fans are however, cheap (maybe $ 25 for a desktop) and the failsafes should be designed to handle a failed fan since that is the most likely situation they will ever see. Also, I hated the fan on my laptop and I would like to see a speed slider so that I could slow the program down.

Finally, this type of computing is not really all that new. The original distributed systems were done with 286’s, 386’s and anything else that could be had for cheap. If there was a speed reliability issue, it probably would have been dealt with by now.