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Unfortunately, my Dell is finally beyond the three-year mark. The recent malfunctioning of the CD reader and CD writer drives within a day of each other suggests either a terrible coincidence or the failure of the controller card… or something even more frightening. I can’t recall the last time I turned it off, and now I’m sort of scared to.

Unfortunately for most consumers, Intel has arranged for Catch-22 to operate at an even more basic level than you discuss, Reid. Rhetorical question (for your amusement): Why should consumer products like PC’s require forced air cooling in the first place? Primarily because the packaging choices and recommendations by Intel mandate it, that’s why.

It’s not that equivalent performance can’t be wrung from silcon chips packaged to work with purely passive cooling methods. Going back some years, Apple did just that with the Cube (not that Apple is any paragon of thermal design expertise). The fact is, releasing CPUs that routinely dissapate 72 watts of power (about the heat load of an average light bulb, and what the standard P4 desktop package is rated for by Intel), then surrounding those processors with more things that generate equal or greater heat, like graphics cards GPUs, high speed disk drives, and other components, and then depending on a couple of fans to keep it all from melting is pretty poor consumer product design. Because active cooling is bound to break, or get contaminated to the point of being ineffective eventually.

There are any number of strategies that could be employed to mitigate this. Some have long been de riguer in laptop design, where the cost of the additional passive components like heat pipes to transfer reject heat load to the outside world without moving parts is part of what increases the cost of laptops over desktops of equivalent performance. And laptop chips and motherboards go to great lengths these days to throttle back the power hungry P4 chips whenever there isn’t need for their full throughput (even if that is mainly a battery conservation measure, meant to give greater operational time on limited battery power). But with the average sized desktop box, you wouldn’t even have to get that exotic, since with a simple change in motherboard construction, you could butt the processor heat sink up against the case, which with slight stamping modifications, could serve as an effective thermal sink. Such things have been talked about for years, but absent much public pressure for these changes, Intel hasn’t moved in those directions. Maybe Steve Ballmer’s call for $100 PCs will provide some stimulus, since getting the component count way down is one way of getting to this price point. If you can get rid of the fans, and the assembly labor that they require, and produce a safer, longer lived product, and more cheaply to boot, why shouldn’t you?

I’m kind of amazed that some legal beagles haven’t yet brought class action suits against Intel and the major PC makers for selling things that are inherently fire ignition sources. And I’m equally amazed that Microsoft hasn’t been named in the lawsuits that haven’t been filed en masse, for not making their OS products read and use the BIOS data, if available, that is read back from the motherboard while the machine is in operation.

You shouldn’t have to reboot a machine regularly to have confidence it isn’t going to go up in smoke. But as long as you have the Dell, maybe you should resolve to take 20 minutes every couple of months, pull the side cover on your machine, and vaccum it, then check the fans are spinning, before popping the cover back on. Bit of a hassle, but better than trying to air out a room where a CPU has smoked big time… Specially after you get your nice new carpets.

Actually, I’ve got one of those cases that opens like a briefcase, with the motherboard on the bottom, and the drives rising up with the top. Makes it quite easy to get in there with the mini-vac (though it’s more like once every six months that I do it). And while I agree with your technical fatwa, I’m still left with a box I need to check more regularly. I guess I got a bit lulled by its quiet performance.

However, when we get the new carpet installed (delayed a week now), the living room is going to be rearranged in a manner that will allow me easy access to the back of the computer I don’t have now (so I can see the fans a’spinnin’). It used to be no big deal to lean over and crook my neck to see the back on the computer. Somehow, eight years after setting up the current arrangment, it now is a big deal.

Life’s funny that way. Not that I’m laughing. And by the way, glad to see you’ve settled where ever it is you’ve settled, at least enough to string a Dixie Cup back to the InterWeb.

I’m glad they got you back up, but somewhat chagrined to find out that I know even less about cooling a pc than I do about the internets clouds.

I almost didn’t get a Dell about the time you got yours, but Elaine was really pushing me to get it.

“You mean you think I deserve the best? But I could whip something together a lot cheaper.”

“Yeah, like the time the smoke detectors went off at 4 am?”

Two months later, when she was constantly on “my” Dell, I realized I’d been had. So here I am as usual, typing away on something I whipped up for a lot cheaper. The only machine with a warranty around here is “her” Dell.

“Two months later, when she was constantly on ‘my’ Dell, I realized I’d been had”

Shhhh. I’m trying to convince my wife she really needs a laptop, rather than replace her old desktop with another.

Of course, “her” laptop will have to have Photoshop and Dreamweaver installed on it, though she doesn’t know how to use either of them, and it will have to have a large hard drive to hold all the the photos she doesn’t take.

WiFi for the couch, too. She’s really going to like it.