P.S. How did I end up using a laptop as my main desktop PC?
Because its very convenient, always having everything at hand.
Oh you're definitely not alone in that nowadays. My mom's using her laptop probably at least 10 times more than her desktop now.
And that's getting to be more and more common it seems.
It is VERY convenient sometimes, so much that even i have considered getting myself a laptop as well ( and i'm the kind of person who spends a fair amount of cash to make sure i get highend CPU and RAM because i want topnotch baseline computing speed ).
Plus, I was using a fan salvaged from some old soviet printer, it ran on 220V, so I had to use a relay controlled by the +12V rail. Was a quite chtonic setup, the rattling beast installed in a hole i cut in the side of the case acted both as the CPU fan and the case fan, with nothing attached to the heatsink itself.
Because that was the era of short-lived 80mm fans and I had *enough* fans rattling and requiring urgent replacement every 3 or 4 months (every fan, dammit!).
Well darn, that's really craptacular fan lifespan. Even the absolute worst i've ever dealt with managed to keep running for most of 2 years, and that was one of those supermini fans, 40*40*5 IIRC.
But who would shut the system down in case of overheat if that single-point-of-failure fan stopped? The mobo couldn't be avare of my 220V fan and neither it or Windows had anything like "if oferheats, shut the hell off!" options, only SpeedFan was capable of doing that.
I experimented, finding the setup could run on passive cooling for a few minutes while Windows 98 was finishing swapping before finally reacting to the shutdown command.
Smart setup.
But even properly installed, it could eventually overheat and die in a case of a fan failure, possibly cooking other components.
True, you needed to go with an oversized heatsink to completely keep it from overheating without a fan. The one i used for my Duron 1G, IIRC it was rated for something like twice the wattage my Duron had. Might even have been triple the wattage.
I got a bit paranoid about it after both my K6-2 500 AND my previous P166 ran into issues that a better HSF setup might have kept from happening. So, ever since then, always oversized my CPU cooling as much as i could without having to pay an arm and a leg for it.
Still, it's pretty much worked out well since then, so i'll call it an obsession of the good kind.
