Z Tech Laptop Fan 200 Words a Day! Technical Help

Technical Help

My laptop fan keeps activating. How can I prevent this?

You may be able to reduce the fan noise by using a program such as: speedfan : http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php

This situation arises particularly with some brands of laptops.

Below is the explanation.

The pictures/cartoons we display in lessons on our course are of three types, swf's gif's and jpg's.

Swf's are the usual format of our animated Memory Trigger cartoons. A Macromedia product called Flash produces these swf files.

Flash uses vectors not "dots" and produce much smaller file sizes compared with jpg's and gif's, but then it uses quite a bit of memory to run the swf's. So the program keeps the memory 'in reserve', in case you play a swf, so then it is ready with its spare capacity already to go.

There is no problem with the program keeping this 'high useage' because if further programs are run, memory is released to the operating system.

The main irritation is with laptops where the high CPU usage can trigger the cooling fan on some brands of laptops, and the background noise can be irritating.

Desktop PC's are not affected to the same extent and there appears to be little or no effect on CPU performance.

To make matters worse, if you play a swf via Internet Explorer or by double clicking on it and the Flash player provided by Macromedia doesn't produce a similar level of CPU activity.

Macromedia are looking into the problem, as we have discussed the problem with them and they are aware of it.

Help within the Course itself...

Remember help is available within your course by right-clicking your mouse on the screen. If there is a block of text or an icon whose function you wish to know about hover the mouse over the area and right-click. Also there is an icon in the shape of a question-mark that leads to an extensive help menu.

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