Today, ladies and gentlemen, I am performing a scientific experiment.

Yes, I realise how shocking it is that a guy working for a lab company 
would actually be doing science. ;-)

It's not exactly the LHC, of course. No, it's rather more mundane than that.

The experiment:

Take one laptop. Place it in the server room for 12 hours. The server 

on the wall does that - as well as blowing away any bits of paper not 
securely weighted down.

Turn on the laptop, and invoke the diagnostics tool from the BIOS 
screen. Abort the testing procedure, and let it just sit there on the PC 
health screen.

This screen gives me various readings. Among them are entries entitled 
"CPU thermistor", "ambient thermistor" and "SODIMM thermistor". It 
appears that the display only updates every 60 seconds, and there is no 
way to make it update any faster, which is a pity.

The "experiment" then consists of writing down the numbers displayed and 
the wall clock time, until the laptop switches off.

For today's run, the readings are as follows:

   Time | CPU  | Ambient | SODIMM
-------+------+---------+--------










...




for that is the calibration tolerance of this particular instrument). Of 
course, I doubt that this "ambient thermistor" is located right on the 
outside of the laptop casing.

Eventually the laptop turns off, and when you next turn it on, the BIOS 
event log shows a shutdown due to a "critical thermal event". With the 
CPU running at nearly the temperature of boiling water, this seems 
unsurprising.

Initially the fan isn't spinning at all. By the end of the test, it's 
reported as spinning at 5000RPM, which I imagine is its maximum speed.

The really weird thing is this: The laptop doesn't feel hot. At the end 
of the last test, the underside was slightly warm. But not warm enough 
to boil water on. Similarly, the air being blasted out of the vents at 
high speed feels at best very slightly warm.

I gather that air in motion always feels cooler than it really is. But 
I've had laptops that you could dry your hands with. For that matter, 
I've had laptops that could cook your lap! This laptop isn't ICE cold, 
but it's barely what I'd describe as "warm".

So... WTF? o_O

Anyway, I've noticed a couple of times now that the shutdown happens 
just as the memory test is running, so I'm going to try again a bit 
later and see if I can reliably reproduce this behaviour...

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