Hot Under the Platen

I was lying on my back watching TV with my laptop on my stomach. Slowly I realized it was burning a hole in my body.

My friend said to get a thermometer that will monitor the temperature. I tried putting a thermometer in the DVD drive but it didn’t work. “No, thermometer software!” she said. Oh. Online I found software that gives me a constant readout of the hard drive’s temperature. It climbed and dipped as I computed away.

The ideas was to keep it below 45 degrees Celsius. Anything above is the RED ZONE. Anytime it approached the RED ZONE, I started to panic and shut down thirty or forty of the seventy-three windows I had open until it calmed down. I figured I needed more cooling power so put a small cooling fan on the desk and pointed it downward at the laptop.

Sprint was running a special on their new wireless hotspot. It’s great. You can log several computers online from one piece of hardware. It only took a few minutes to set it up and it was humming along. That same afternoon I picked it up to move it and I yelled and threw it against the wall like a ninja star. It was burning hot! After I got out of the emergency room with a my hand wrapped like a mummy, I purchased another desktop fan and pointed it at the hotspot.

I noticed my laptop starting to overheat again. I decided it would help my laptop if I took off iTunes and moved it onto its own computer. I listen to podcasts all day and the overhead on my laptop was now too much. I fired up an old Windows XP based PC and got the Itunes rolling. It wasn’t long before I noticed the temperature of this older PC starting to climb. I took out a circulating fan and pointed it at the PC.

The Itunes PC needed it’s own monitor so I set up an old giant monitor. Man, that thing is hot. I took a tower fan out of storage and with my good hand I set it up to blow directly on the monitor. I looked around at my growing data center and I wondered what kind of fans Google has.

I left all the fans going and went to the store. When I returned the fans were going full blast as the laptop crunched numbers and the hotspot downloaded podcasts to the iTunes computer. Yet, somehow the temperature in the room had increased. I looked on the wall and it was 90 degrees.

Everything was hot- the computers, the monitors, the cables, the walls, the carpet, even the fans. I finally knocked a hole in the wall and installed a fan used by car-makers to test wind dynamics on the new models. I ran the giant cord down the block and tapped into the city power grid. It started up slow but was soon running at high speed. As I sat at the desk my skin was pushed back against my face and papers were flying all over the room.

I cracked a window to release some pressure and my clothes flew out of the closet and down the street. The room started to rumble and shake. Oh, no, not an earthquake. Not now. The fan was blowing so hard my apartment was breaking away from the building. Soon the whole apartment was flying above the 405, driven by the giant fan in the wall with all the fans blowing and iTunes going.

The good thing: I looked down and the laptop said 42 Celsius. Finally.