I can hear it 15 feet away as I approach my latest workstation. As a nomadic being my workstation, my node, my interface is a laptop and I can hear the whine of its fans growing louder as I approach.

Many are accustom to the variable tone of laptop cooling, indeed the rising and falling intensity of the fans create a sort of feedback to know the strain brought to bear on the box as you play flash games online, check your mail or any of the other daily tasks that have become routine in your digital life. Its like the sigh humans give when burdened with more work, but your laptop is always sighing, always whining–its just doing so more quietly at times than others. Actually, most laptop owners can remember a time after immediately unwrapping their shiny new hardware, when the fans seemed silent, the new box seemed to take everything you could throw at it without so much as a whimper from the fans. Yet laptops, like most people, overtime become tired and begin to complain more and more until they finally give up or die.

This does not just occur in laptops of course, all things become weaker over time–however, in laptops this condition is more pronounced by its real-time whiny feedback on the the stress endured by its tiny commoditized plastic components. Being tiny, plastic and produced as cheaply as possible a laptop’s decay is readily observable within as few as 2 years of steady use.

With fan feedback it becomes easy to grow intimate with the load various application tasks place on your laptop. The usual downward spiral of laptop decay can be summarized thus:

• you purchase a new box (laptop)
• you load all of the software you need onto the box
• you then settle into routine use of the box
• depending on the environment and the amount of resource intensive tasks you preform, the little fans work on demand to maintain temp
• overtime the fans become worn-down and gunked-up, making them less efficient at cooling
• the fans then run at longer intervals to maintain temp thus causing more wear and tear
• this continues until the average sustained temp of the box increases due to the struggling fans
• other components in the box begin to experience higher temp and thus more stress which decreases the efficiency of the entire box (most pronounced are processors that throttle performance on conditions such as heat)
• as the box decreases in performance and tasks take longer to complete thus requiring the fans to run for longer durations (and you to wait more)
• the downward spiral continue until the box finally gives out

 

[read entire post @ futureprogress.net]

 

 

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What is your most hated Bloatware that you just cannot live without?