Or why my laptop was overheating!

In March, I wanted to replace my Dell which was good but was giving frequent blue screens.

I was tired of endless blue screens and wanted something good. I am a gamer as well, so I ended up with two options:

  1. A Lenovo laptop with high end specs.
  2. A HP ‘budget gaming’ laptop with AMD stuff.

Now, I would have happily gone with Lenovo as it could beat HP any day but there was one major issue:

No laptop had a SSD. In fact, none of the laptops I found online even had 7200 RPM hard disk.

Since I absolutely wanted games, I went for HP. It was half the price of Lenovo with A10 APU and a AMD 2 GB GPU.

I had troubles with it since day one. Not your “this this is not working at all” troubles but small issues like Windows refusing to update, software causing strange issues. (Most of them can be pointed on Windows 8 though!)

For a month or so, my laptop fan was always running at full speed. I was confused at this behaviour. 3 days back, I got tired of it and decided to find the issue.

After 10 minutes of closing programs and trying differentc combinations, I ended up finding the culprit:

Mailbird.

Yes, my lovely mail client was causing this.

I was surprised but I decided to postpone this to later due to lack of time. Yesterday, I uninstalled my anti virus and even after that, Mailbird continued same behaviour.

Then during a call with a friend, it struck me: It was not Mailbird, it was me!

2 months back, I was playing around with dual graphics settings in AMD Catalyst. For some reason, I had assigned “High Performance” graphics settings to Mailbird. So whenever I launched it, my dedicated GPU would take over. Given that my CPU is mostly under stress, it was causing the laptop fan to spin up a lot.

I set the graphics to power saver and problem solved.

Now, I have a virtual machine running, with 20 tabs in browser, iTunes and Steam in background and laptop is still very silent.

Anyway, the moral of story is that your mail client doesn’t require power of dedicated graphics.

Second, if your laptop fan is spinning too much, GPU settings may be there to blame.