And there was darkness
 

My laptop at home has been showing some kind of "bad behaviour" which I tend to contribute to a combination of overheating and Prime95. At arbitrary moments while Prime95 is running all goes suddenly black: computer has shut itself off.
Normally my OS (Windows XP) would insult me heavily for this kind of thing, but no, it does not mind. I have tried several times to let this happen with Prime95 switched off, but then it is running fine. Another problem seems to be the speed of the computer: its specifics

Intel Celeron 2.4 GHz
256 MB Ram
L1 Cache 8 KB
L2 Cache 128 KB

The benchmark page says that the average iteration time should be around 0.0430 but my machine is usually showing an average of around 0.130. Three times slower.

I am no computerexpert at all, but I can follow explanations. Does anybody have some suggestions to solve these problems ?

Thanks a lot in advance,

Kees :cat:

You might have looked at something wrong on the benchmarks page. Depending on the size of the exponent you are testing, your iteration time could be about right for a Celeron with only 128K cache.

Your other problem does seem to be related to heat. Possibly a fan or heatsink clogged with dust. That is a quite common problem. If excessive heat is also causing your CPU to "throttle" in order to protect itself, then it could also explain the speed issue.

I looked indeed at 256 KB cache L2 in stead of 128, however I am doublechecking a number around 16M so, there still seems to be a speed problem.
How to dedust a fan or heatsink yourself on a laptop ? Again, can do some things but am not an engineer,

thanks,

Kees :cat:

Blowing really hard into the air vent is a good place to start :wink: Watch out for the sudden burst of dust.

Blown hard into it, carefully aspirated dust but to no avail.

Throttling helps though,

still had crashes with Throttle=5
but with Throttle=15 it is running (though slowness remains)