CpuIdle 5.5
One of the things that I noticed, apart from the fact that there wasn’t as much time to run off and make a coffee, was that it really ran hot. Despite there being a total of three fans inside the case (one of them directly on the CPU itself) the machine gave off a tremendous amount of heat; I don’t have any measuring or monitoring equipment of any sort, but I first became aware of this when I noticed that any CD that sat in the player for longer than a couple of minutes came out quite warm - even hot!
What worried me then, and worries me even now, is that this simply can’t be good for the computer - least of all for the hard drive, and any disks that I may use. Every night I backup my most crucial information onto a ZIP disk; it takes about five minutes, and the disk comes out warm. Very warm in fact.
How much of a problem?
The truth is that to this day, I don’t know how much of a problem this is. I know that my computer doesn’t crash because of overheating - but is there some damage being caused? Is the life-expectancy of my disks and hard drive being shortened? I honestly don’t know - I get conflicting information and opinions wherever I look.
Solution
I started looking around at hardware solutions, at fans, coolers, more suitable cases, and from time to time kept coming across mention of the CPU-idle software, usually in the newsgroups. This software claimed to be able to “lower the CPU temperature by disabling it when not needed, which in turn prolongs the CPU’s life and cuts power consumption”. Hmmm.
My first reaction to these claims was a healthy, cynical disbelief! I contacted the author, received a copy of the software, and installed it onto my system. To my surprise, it actually worked! I mentioned that I don’t have any measuring equipment, so how do I know?
There’s a grill at the front of my computer’s case where a very gentle warm breeze can be usually felt - when my machine’s working hard, it’s noticeably hotter. The first thing that I noticed was that even after around ten minutes of running the software, the breeze was noticeably cooler. In the interest of establishing more unscientific scientific-fact, I then ran my usual backup with a ZIP disk, taking around five minutes. The ZIP disk came out noticeably cooler than usual.
At this point I swallowed my positivity, and realised that the software must be slowing down my machine - whether by using-up an obscene amount of memory, or simply by using a sizeable chunk of the system resources in general. Okay. But this time I had to turn to more concrete tests, and decided to benchmark the system (using a variety of different methods) with and without the software running.
We ran a range of different tests, and monitored the effect that the software had on a variety of different aspects of the system, and found that while there was some decrease, this was absolutely negligible - in fact a grand total of a 0.6% speed decrease! Plain English? This software will not slow your system down at all, and seeing as though it DOES what it aims to do - namely cool down your CPU… what more can you ask?
The software is around 300 KB in size, and the trial version will give you 30 days to see whether you want to keep it or not.
This is a very small program, that certainly has the potential to extend the life of your computer. Our evaluation included only the most basic of tests, but we certainly noticed a significant decrease in temperature. It was also noticeable that the software didn’t interfere with any aspect of the system or any other software at all. We’re keeping it on our machine, and would advise that you try out the demo for yourself.