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Author Topic: Giveaway of the Day - HDDlife for Notebooks - Using your notebook on your bed ?  (Read 6787 times)

patteo

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Giveaway of the Day - HDDlife for Notebooks

HDDLife for Notebooks is a real-time hard drive monitoring utility with alerts, malfunction protection and data loss prevention functions. This hard drive inspector is a proactive hard drive failure detection system which manages all of your hard drive risks."
http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/

I have for sometime now been telling my family members to be careful about using their notebook mobility with some care.

I mean it's so easy to bring it onto your bed and fall asleep with it on, or for that matter, use it for an extended period while having it sit on your mattress, sofa etc.

But have you noticed that laptops have ventilation holes at the bottom of their casings.

The soft mattress can really block these causing a progressive deterioration of the hardware and maybe cause a catastrophic harddisk failure (through over-heating) or worse still, cause the battery to catch fire (maybe explode) - what with the recent massive battery recall becoming a distant memory.

One way of having your cake and eating it is to use a hard surface (maybe a board - I use a strong plastic box lid [flameable !!!] that will not obstruct the vents). And I make sure my laptop is set to standby or hibernate if there's prolonged period of inactivity)

Now maybe I'm paranoid - but who knows - But here's a freebie to confirm this - HDDlife for Notebooks - I think it will measure the temperature of the Notebook harddisk too.
« Last Edit: January 19, 2007, 07:59 AM by patteo »

Darwin

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patteo, you are not paranoid. My mother in law was staying with us two summers ago and did exactly what you describe - fell asleep with my notebook sitting on her duvet. In the morning it was as dead as a dodo - the hard drive was cooked. The next day I bought a notebook drive, a big tray, and ordered a cooling pad and it's been peachy ever since... The cooling pad is probably overkill but it's a six and a half year old notebook that shipped with a 4200 rpm drive that had been updated to a 5400 rpm one and I suspect that the cooling unit isn't up to the the job... Anyway, thanks for the heads up - I was disappointed the other day when HDDLife for desktops was offered instead of this. Now I have no reason to complain (don't worry about me too much, it won't take me long to find something else...   ;D)!

Carol Haynes

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Be warned though I bought a copy ages ago and found it doesn't word well with some WD drives - it reports random temperatures. When I reported the problem to them HDDLife support blamed the WD implementation of SMART - seems unlikely as other monitors (such as SpeedFan) don't seem to give false readings.

Darwin

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Thanks Carol - as luck would have it, I am runnning a WD drive in the notebook I described above. I'll keep a loot out for random readings.

Carol Haynes

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Hopefully they have fixed the issue now (it was a while ago that I used the app) but I found drive temps with ATA Caviar drives very unreliable.

patteo

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Interestingly, Speedfan is freeware or should I say Donationware as there's a donation button on the site.
http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php

I guess Speedfan would do the job as well if not better.

Just take note that you will not be able to reinstall HDDLife for Notebook (giveawayoftheday version) if you reinstall your notebook.

But again, one should not over-rely on these utilities for the condition of harddisks.

Nothing can replace a consistent backup routine.

Darwin

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I have also seen the praises of Notebook Hardware Control (NHC) sung on forums around the internet. Having tried it last week, though, I would advise anyone loading it to monitor its resource utilisation. On my system is was very resource intensive (no numbers recorded to back this up, though). HDDLife is very light on resources and does what I want it to. I don't know how long it will remain on my system because I am very meticulous about data backups (Genie BackUp Manager Pro) and disk imaging (Acronis TrueImage) and get the feeling that apps like HDDLife are more of a novelty. Who knows, though, perhaps I am wrong.

kfitting

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I've been using NHC for awhile and haven't noticed the resource problem.  Currently at less than <1% CPU and 3.45 mb RAM.  Of course, different systems will react differently!

Kevin

Darwin

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Yeah, I was pretty sure that my experience with NHC was unusual. FWIW, it is more configureable and gives more information than does HDDLife Pro, so if anyone else installs it and doesn't see the resource problem that I did, you're lucky! It's free and it's powerful.

'nuff said...

Darwin

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I'm running a later version of  NHC and can confirm that it's not using any CPU at all and only about 4.5MB of RAM. Quite an interesting application, I only re-installed it this morning and will report back with my experiences!